


There Should Be Stars

by childhoodinfamy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (partially), Canon Compliant, Canon Disabled Character, Demisexual Steve Rogers, Epistolary, Italian Bucky Barnes, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Mutual Pining, One-armed Bucky Barnes, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-03 14:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 45,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6613837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childhoodinfamy/pseuds/childhoodinfamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“All memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.<br/>But sometimes there were good times.<br/>Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep<br/>beside me and never dreamed afraid.</p><p>There should be stars for great wars<br/>like ours. There ought to be awards<br/>and plenty of champagne for the survivors.”<br/>- Sandra Cisneros</p><p>Or, it takes them decades.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One.

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be about two thousand words, but instead I spent a year and a half on it. I really wanted to write their relationship from the start; I did so much research in the process (Bucky really is the oldest of four!! They really do meet in June of 1928!!), and it was truly a joy to write.
> 
> As usual, thank you so much to Sarah, for talking to me about this essentially every day and reading every single draft.

_Part One._

(All memories to tell you the truth aren’t good. But sometimes there were good times.)

 

They meet on a muggy day in June, in 1928, just before the school year ends.

Like every day, Bucky’s ma has told him to keep his head down. To stay out of trouble.

Like every day, he plans to listen.

At school, he scrawls his name, left-handed, in the corner of his paper. He does his multiplication tables dutifully. Eight times seven is fifty-six…eight times eight is sixty-four…eight times nine is…the eights give him troubles. He squirms in his seat until it’s his turn to read aloud. He hopes for the big paragraphs, the ones with good descriptions and long sentences and plenty of commas.

After the last bell rings, he walks down the hall to his sister’s classroom, waiting for her to trail out. She takes her time, so he walks into the classroom and greets his old teacher with a quick “Hey, Mrs. McIntyre! Yes, I’m staying out of trouble. Yes, the sixth grade is great. I just wish the teachers were as sweet as you are, ma’am!” as Bella rolls her eyes at him. He waits while she places the last of her workbooks into her book bag. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, and they walk into the hallway.

Before Bucky can say anything, Bella tells him she’ll be having dinner at her friend Anne’s house.

“Did you ask Ma?” Bucky asks.

“Can’t you just tell her?”

Bucky sighs. “Fine. But you owe me. You have to do dishes next time it’s my turn.”

Bella squints her eyes, considering. “Fine.” She turns on her heel and catches up with Anne, who is just emerging from her own classroom.

Bucky adjusts his bag on his shoulder, preparing to make the walk home on his own. Maybe he’ll stop in at the bakery, to see if he can charm his way to some stale rolls for free.

He almost makes it. There’s a paper bag of rolls in his hand, the crumbs of one dusting the front of his shirt and his fingertips. He can nearly smell his ma’s lasagna, warm and cheesy, just a block away.

And then—the sounds of a fight, echoing off the bricks of the alley between the shoe repair and the deli.

It takes Bucky all of three seconds to drop the bag and enter the fray.

The boy is bruised and thin, but taller than Bucky by an inch or so. When Bucky helps him to standing, he sticks his hand out. “I’m Bucky Barnes,” he says. “Well, technically James Barnes, but everyone calls me Bucky. Except my ma, who says I’m too old for that now.”

The other boy eyes him for a moment before shaking his hand. “Steve Rogers.”

“Nice to meet you, Steve!” Bucky says.

“You didn’t have to do that. I had him on the ropes.”

“Sure, pal. You live close by? I can give you a walk home.”

“I’m fine.”

“My pa would never forgive me if I didn’t see to it that you got home okay. Besides,” Bucky gestures to Steve’s face, “we gotta make sure your mom patches up that cut.”

“I can do it,” Steve says. “She’s working a double tonight.”

“Oh.” Bucky considers for a moment. “Well, then you should come to dinner at my house. My sister’s at a friend’s so there’ll be an extra spot and my ma’s got some stuff we can use for those scrapes. She says she doesn’t have a choice with a kid like me,” Bucky says with a shrug.

“It’s fine,” Steve insists.

“Don’t be silly!” Bucky throws an arm around Steve’s shoulder and leads him in the direction of his family’s house. “We’ve got plenty of room and Ma’s making lasagna,” he assures Steve.

It’s a bit of a lie, really—the Barnes house is crowded already with three kids and a rotating cast of cousins, but Bella’s at Anne’s and he thinks at least one of the cousins is working tonight.

He can feel the moment Steve decides to follow him. Bucky grins and chatters away about his family the whole way home; by the time they’re walking through the door, Steve already knows everyone’s name and how best to impress Ma Barnes.

“Just make sure you smile a little, distract her from the bruises,” Bucky says. “Or else she’s gonna know you’re a punk.”

Steve laughs at that.

 

-

 

It’s like falling into step with a stranger on the sidewalk—accidental, pure happenstance, but for a moment, it feels like fate.

 

-

 

Steve starts drawing right around the same time Bucky starts burying his nose in dime science fiction novels from the drugstore.

There’s a new one that pops up every week. They all look the same to Steve, and sound the same, too, when Bucky reads the back covers. Bucky keeps trying to shove them at Steve when he finishes reading, insisting that this one is the best, better than all the other books he’s recommended. Steve gets through half of one before he’s decided that they’re not worth the effort.

He gets tired of explaining that he doesn’t want to read them, too, so he has to find a hobby of his own.

“I’m a little busy, Buck,” he says.

“You’re staring at the ceiling.”

Steve says the first excuse that comes into his head. “I’m going to draw.”

“You can’t draw.”

“I’ll learn.”

Bucky crosses his arms. “Why?”

“Because I really, really don’t want to read your books anymore.” And with that, Steve gets up to grab the materials he needs. They have paper and pencils--short ones, with no erasers and plenty of tooth marks--in the kitchen drawer.

He’s been filling his notes with clumsy sketches for years now. The only thing that changes is that he starts really paying attention to it.

He finds something new to practice drawing each day. There are loose pages covered in half-likenesses of his shoes, his bed, the fire escape, a couple of Sarah Rogers. And then there is page after page of Bucky, whose hands move fast and mouth moves faster, whose eyes are more expressive than anyone else’s. Or at least, that’s what Steve tells himself the fifth time he starts practicing the curve of Bucky’s smile that week. It’s because he’s interesting. It’s because of that crooked front tooth he has, the one that catches on his lip sometimes when it’s cold outside and Bucky’s mouth gets dry.

It’s normal to notice these things, Steve thinks, because he’s an artist now. He has to notice them, and he’s stuck looking at Bucky’s face every day, so he might as well notice these things about Bucky and not someone else.

This is perfectly normal.

 

-

 

Bucky spends most of his time at Steve’s, chatting with Sarah Rogers and trying to get Steve to focus on homework instead of drawing in the margins. He brings leftovers from his ma’s ice box, sometimes, to try to make up for all the food he eats and the space he takes up.

Each day that first summer, he does his chores and tells his ma he’ll be walking to Steve’s, three blocks away in a brick apartment building. It’s quiet at Steve’s house. Bucky likes to interrupt it with his own personal cloud of noise.

He knocks on the door, each time, right hand hooked in his suspenders and left hand balancing the food, a grin sitting crooked on his face, crinkling his eyes; he rocks back on his heels until Sarah opens the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Rogers!” he greets, the words familiar on his lips. “Is Steve home?”

“Why yes, he is. Would you like to come in?” Her voice lilts with a faint Irish accent, soft and kind. Nothing like Bucky’s own Indiana-Brooklyn combination, which is harsh and loud and honed to be heard above the cacophony of home.

She steps aside to let Bucky through the door, and Bucky says, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Rogers!”

“Just call me Sarah,” she reminds him at least once a week. “You’re like family now.”

“I can’t do that, Mrs. Rogers. If my mom caught wind, I’d get a punishment so bad I’d never be able to sit again.”

Sarah laughs. “Fair enough, Mr. Barnes. We’ll keep it formal.”

Bucky grins. He likes the way that sounds—Mr. Barnes. Like he’s an adult, like he matters.

Steve always walks out then, hands smudged with pencil lead at least half the time, groaning about how Bucky’s head is going to float away if his mom keeps flattering him like that.

The Rogerses’ home is comfortable and familiar, even more so than his own. His own house is loud and strict and always just a little too full. They’d moved to Brooklyn from Indiana to be closer to his ma’s sister and her family, but since his uncle died a few years ago, Bucky’s family had been taking in his aunt’s kids to try to help out; the house is always over-crowded.

So, six months after Bucky meets Steve, when Bucky’s ma tells him that he’s going to have a new little sibling in the spring, he nods and, after only a moment’s consideration, asks to go to Steve’s. His ma presses her lips together, says, “ _Ritorna alle sei_ ,” and lets him go.

He walks there, slower than usual, and doesn’t grin while he waits at the door. His feet stay planted firmly on the ground. Sarah’s eyebrows go up in concern when she opens the door.

“Hi Mrs. Rogers,” he says, before she can ask if he’s alright. “Steve home?”

“He is, Mr. Barnes. Would you like to come in?”

“Yes please,” Bucky says. He walks by quietly. “Okay if I go back to his room?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Rogers.”

He walks straight back to Steve’s room, opens the door, and flops down on the bed next to where Steve’s sitting cross-legged with a sketchbook in his lap. The bed creaks under Bucky’s forceful weight, and Steve sighs.

“Be careful, you jerk,” Steve says. “I could have smudged.”

“Sorry,” Bucky says. He stares at the ceiling, but he can feel Steve looking at him. He knows the question is starting to form in Steve’s head, and he wants to stop that conversation before it starts. “Ma’s pregnant again,” he states flatly.

“Oh,” Steve says in surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Bucky likes that Steve doesn’t ask any more questions. He’s not in the mood to talk about it anyway, so he changes the subject. “What are you drawing?”

“Nothing,” Steve says, turning to the next page. He does that a lot. He doesn’t always let Bucky see his art, no matter how many times Bucky pesters him, so Bucky doesn’t bother today.

“Can I sleep here tonight?” Bucky asks.

“’Course you can.”

“Thank you,” Bucky says.

Steve gets up, probably to check with his mom, though she’s never said no. When he comes back into the room, he says, “You need to borrow pajamas?” He doesn’t mention the tears Bucky’s swiping away with the cuff of his sleeve.

“Thanks,” Bucky says. For the pajamas and for the quiet.

“Any time,” Steve answers, and Bucky knows he understands.

 

-

 

There is a small group of knobby-kneed kids in their neighborhood who get together every week to play a messy game of baseball, in the widest street they can find. They never have quite enough people to fill in the positions, and Bucky tries to wave Steve in every week. Steve shakes his head quickly, and shouts out a “No way!” before settling down on the brick steps of the tailor’s.

The game never goes too well. A minimum of two kids skin their knees every time, and Bucky is always the proud recipient of at least two elbows to the ribs. He throws them just as often, and shows Steve his bruises proudly at the end of each game.

Steve, meanwhile, spends most of the game drawing loose approximations of Bucky’s pitches, his thin legs spread just slightly and bent, hands gripped tight on the bat. Steve always makes sure to bring a pencil without an eraser, so he can’t spend too long worrying over accuracy.

When his hand gets tired, or he gets too frustrated, he closes the sketchbook and watches Bucky, who spends the whole game shouting taunts at the other kids and sauntering to the pitcher’s mound--a sock, blackened by street grime that has been placed in the center of their makeshift diamond.

Steve rolls his eyes today when Bucky points at him and winks. “This one’s for you, Rogers!” he shouts.

Just before throwing a pitch that hits a bit off-mark.

That is to say, it hits Steve in the eye.

Steve bends double as soon as it happens, holding the left side of his face. He can feel it already starting to swell, and his eye watering just slightly. He winces, poking at the tender skin with the tips of his slim fingers.

“Oh my _God_ ,” Bucky says, suddenly at Steve’s shoulder. He’s sitting next to Steve, and out of his good eye, Steve can see that Bucky’s already crying, his face panicked and crumpled. “I’m so sorry, Steve. I am _so_ sorry. Are you okay? Oh _God_ , I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Steve says. He stands up. “I think maybe I oughtta go home, though.”

“I’m so sorry. Can I walk you at least?”

“Sure.”

“Steve, I am so, _so_ sorry.”

“Please stop apologizing, Bucky. It’s okay.”

He doesn’t. No matter how many times Steve insists that he’s fine, Bucky keeps repeating apologies the whole way to Steve’s apartment. His face is red and blotchy, and he’s smearing the snot on his sleeve when sniffing isn’t enough to keep it in his nose anymore. He only stops when they get to the apartment and Steve’s mom comes out to greet them.

As soon as she sees Steve’s hand on his face, her mouth flattens into a line and she walks back to the bathroom to get the first aid kit. Bucky launches into the full story, his voice loud with crying. When Sarah’s back in the room, Steve cuts him short.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m _so sorry,_ Mrs. Rogers,” Bucky says. He’s covering his face with his hands, his elbows on the dining room table and his shoulders slumped.

Steve and his mom look at each other, and he can tell that she’s trying to hold back a laugh. Steve lets his out, though it scrunches his face up, hurting his swollen eye.

Bucky looks up, still sniffling.

“I’m just glad it wasn’t a fight this time,” Steve’s mom says. “Thank you for bringing him home, Mr Barnes.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says again. And then to Steve, “Please stop laughing.”

That just makes Steve and his mom laugh harder. Bucky scowls for the rest of the night, apologizing with his arms crossed and his eyebrows flat.

 

-

 

When Bucky sleeps at Steve’s, they sleep in the living room, with the worn-down cushions pulled off of the couch. Sometimes they’ll arrange them in a square with the pillow from Steve’s bed and some spare blankets, playing games with the old pack of cards they find in a kitchen drawer, or else laying side by side and listening to Bucky’s favorite radio programs (they always laugh about Buck Rogers—“It’s like I really am family!” Bucky jokes).

Sometimes, though, when Steve wants to draw and Bucky wants to talk, they line the cushions up in a straight line and lay with both their heads in the middle. Bucky lays on his back, hands up in the air gesturing widely as he tells Steve about the latest Barnes family drama. Steve lays on his stomach, pushed up on one elbow and sketching. He pretends to draw other things, but there are pages and pages of Bucky’s hands, in a million different positions, the way they look when Bucky’s telling a story. Fingers spread wide, square at the ends and nails always cut short. And sometimes, a little shakier and less confident, there’s Bucky’s face, too. His mouth open in the middle of a word and his eyes scrunched or open wide, his eyebrows loud on his forehead.

The best nights, though, are the ones where Bucky makes up stories like the ones on the radio. With make-believe characters with ridiculous names and plots that would never really happen. He tells stories with aliens and spaceships, with flying cars and chase scenes, and every one ends with the hero falling in love.

On those nights, Steve sets his sketchbook aside and pulls his blanket up high, covering all of him up to his hairline, his hands holding the fabric a few inches under his chin, so only his face and small bits of stray hair stick out from underneath. Bucky watches Steve upside down from where he’s lying; he smiles when Steve reacts to the plot twists. Steve doesn’t say anything, but his fingers grip his blanket a little tighter and Bucky grins as he continues on.

Every so often, Sarah will be in the kitchen, making bread or cleaning up, while Bucky does this. She laughs at all the right spots, always claps at the end of the stories.

 

-

 

Bucky likes the way the Rogers family listens. Like they hear every word. Like every syllable is important.

 

-

 

Steve gets sick sometimes.

It’s not surprising, really, if Bucky thinks about all of Steve’s allergies or the way his breathing wheezes when he walks up the stairs or the way his skin was always a little gray, but it’s still a bit of a shock when December rolls around and Bucky sees his friend—stubborn-willed and never without an opinion—laying in his bed, face pale, his mother hovering over him. His eyes and mouth closed.

Bucky stands in the doorway to Steve’s bedroom, worrying at the strap of his book bag. Sarah waves him in after a moment, her eyes and posture inviting him in despite her silence.

He sits in the chair Sarah must have brought from the dining room; she has dark bags under her eyes, Bucky notices, and he thinks maybe she’s been sleeping in that chair.

Once Sarah is out of the room—with a quiet “call if either of you needs anything”—it takes Bucky a few minutes to decide what to do; in the end, he retrieves a novel from his book bag. It’s the one they’re reading in class, one with dense type and thin paper. He’s got twenty pages to read before school tomorrow.

Might as well read them now, he figures.

Might as well read them to Steve.

His voice is tighter than he wants it to be. Like every word is a sliver of Bucky’s worry escaping, collecting in a cloud around his head only to be sucked back in when he takes a breath.

Steve is angry when he wakes up. Angry that Bucky has seen him like this, angry that he is sick, angry that he can’t get a sentence out without breaking into fits of coughing.

“You want me to get your mom?” Bucky asks. Steve’s eyes just look hard as he tries to steal air between coughs.

“You want me to leave?” Bucky asks. Steve’s expression gets a little angrier, but his shoulders slump, too.

“Here,” Bucky offers. He sets his book on his lap and holds it open with his right hand, taking Steve’s hand with his left. “One squeeze for yes, two for no. Okay?”

Steve squeezes his hand once.

“You want me to get your mom?”

Two.

“You want some water?”

One. Bucky gets it for him. Waits a moment.

“You okay?”

One.

“You want me to leave?”

A pause, and Bucky’s heart is beating harder than he thinks it should.

A pause, and then two squeezes.

Bucky can’t help but smile a little. “I knew you secretly liked me.” Steve rolls his eyes.  “You want me to keep reading?”

One.

“Okay. Chapter Six.”

 

-

 

When Steve comes back to school, Bucky comes to pick him up. Bella is standing on the steps behind him, arms crossed and looking irritated at the detour.

Bucky nearly hits Steve in the face when he opens the door.

“Hey, Steve! I was just about to knock,” Bucky greets.

“Saw you coming.”

Bucky squints at Steve. “Did you get shorter?”

“No,” Steve says immediately, twisting his mouth as he slings his bag onto his shoulder. It’s a little heavy, his arms still tired from the days in bed. “Why?”

“You look small,” Bucky says.

“Gee, thanks.”

“No! That’s not what I meant. I just—Bella, doesn’t he look shorter?”

Bella rolls her eyes, already starting to walk away. “You got taller, idiot. Hurry up, we’re going to be late.”

Bucky turns to Steve, his eyes wide and smile stretching his lips. “She’s right! Ma was just telling me that I need new pants. Steve, I’m taller than you now!”

“Great,” Steve says flatly.

Bucky yammers the whole way to school. Steve stays silent. He lets Bucky have his fun, but gives little more than a few grunts and eyerolls of acknowledgement. Still, Bucky’s smile lasts through the whole day, and Steve’s mom laughs when Steve explains the reason.

“He’s taller than me now,” Steve says. It comes out more disappointed than he means for it to, so he adds a smile so flimsy that it barely manages not to fall off his face and spill to the ground around his feet.

“Don’t get too excited,” Sarah warns. She ruffles Steve’s hair. “Steve’ll be catching up any day now!”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Bucky says.

Steve has the sinking feeling that Bucky’s right this time.

 

-

 

Steve’s voice drops before Bucky’s. It cracks for the first time on Bucky’s fourteenth birthday, and Bucky looks furious. He spends the rest of the school year complaining that Steve is younger, that this really isn’t fair.

Steve just rolls his eyes.

Bucky stares up at his ceiling a few more nights than he’d like to admit, thinking about the way Steve’s voice has started to sound low and serious and _older._ He bites his lip and tells himself it’s just jealousy that’s giving him these goosebumps on his arms.

 

-

 

Three months later, just after Bucky’s finished the eighth grade and a few weeks before Steve’s thirteenth birthday, he wakes up sweaty from a dream, and, half awake, realizes what’s happened.

Quietly, he gets out of the bed he shares with his brother and walks over to the dresser. He opens the drawer quietly, retrieves a new pair of underwear, and tip-toes to the bathroom to change. When he gets back, he tosses the old pair into the very back of the drawer, to be washed only when it’s his turn to do the laundry.

As he climbs back into bed, he hears, “Bucky?”

He holds his breath for a moment before saying, “Yeah, Billy?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, Billy. Go back to sleep.”

“Okay.”

Bucky waits with his eyes scrunched closed until he hears Billy’s quiet snores start up again. In the quiet, Bucky covers his face with both hands and sighs.

“ _Shit,_ ” he lets himself say, even though his mom has warned him about swearing.

He lays awake the rest of the night, pretending that he doesn’t remember Steve’s voice in his dream, or the way dream-Steve’s mouth had felt against his, or the way it hadn’t been the first time Bucky had thought about it.

He lays awake with his hands clenched around the sheets, pretending that his mind isn’t wandering.

 

-

 

That summer, Bucky takes Steve to the Brooklyn Museum for his birthday. He insists on paying their subway fare, no matter how much Steve protests.

“I’ve been saving my allowance for weeks, Stevie. I’m paying.”

Steve sighs and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Fine.”

“That’s the kind of birthday spirit I was hoping for!”

The museum is only a few miles away from their apartments, large and stone with columns out front. Steve can’t remember ever going somewhere so elegant. The woman who takes Bucky’s money is wearing a pressed dress, her hair perfectly curled, and she’s nice to them despite Steve’s slightly messy appearance.

“Admission is free,” she says with a smile.

“I know,” Bucky responds. “I did my research. I want to make a donation.”

As soon as they’re through the turnstiles, Bucky is grabbing Steve’s wrist and tugging him towards the elevator. The attendant asks what floor they need, and Bucky confidently reports that they’d like the third, please. He whispers to Steve, “I thought those would be your favorites. Black and white, like all the ones you like.”

The third floor has a whole room of charcoal sketches, by artists Steve’s read about in books, and some he’s never heard of. Bucky’s voice is too loud for museums. He comments on the art, and Steve can tell he’s trying to use the words Steve’s been reporting from the art books he borrows from the library; he misuses almost every one, but he smiles whenever Steve nods and agrees with him.

“Steve, you gotta see this one!” Bucky shouts from across the room. The other patrons glare at Steve as he makes his way over to Bucky, who is beaming at a sketch of a woman, curled in on herself. “This is the one you liked so much from that book!”

Steve only looks at it for a moment. It is. But Bucky is so excited and earnest, his hands shoved in his pockets, and Steve only just realizes that Bucky’s done his hair all neat for the day, his shirt tucked into his pants and his suspenders perfectly adjusted on his shoulders, which are slightly broader than the last time Steve noticed. Steve finds himself for the first time itching not for a pencil, but for Bucky’s shoulder.

His face grows hot and his eyes wide, and he turns away as quickly as he can.

“Yeah, it’s nice,” he says. It comes out tight and forced.

“You good?” Bucky asks.

“Great,” Steve answers, a little too loud.

Bucky twists his eyebrows and gives a short laugh. “Okay, punk. Do you want to keep looking, or was that enough for you?”

“Whatever you want.”

Bucky rolls his eyes, and that damn crooked grin still hangs on his face, like it’s been lazily glued on. “Might as well get my money’s worth.”

 

They stay at the museum for an hour or so after that, and then just barely make it back onto the subway back to their neighborhood. It’s crowded, and the doors nearly catch Steve’s pants leg when they close. There are enough people that he and Bucky--barely tall enough to reach the railings--have to stand for the ride. The lurching nudges Steve against Bucky every time. Steve tries to ignore the tingling in his fingers, and the way his breath is more shallow than usual.

“You sure you’re okay, Stevie?” Bucky asks. “You’re real pink.”

“I’m fine,” Steve says.

Outside his apartment building, he says a hasty goodbye to Bucky, who has to go home for dinner.

“I should come up and say hi to your mom at least,” Bucky says. “I’ve got time!”

“She’s running late probably. I don’t think she’s home yet,” Steve can feel the obviousness of his lie, and Bucky doesn’t buy it. He brushes past Steve, and jogs up the stairs. By the time Steve catches up, Bucky’s standing in the doorway and wrapping up a conversation with Steve’s mom.

“Yeah, we had a real nice time! I was just telling Steve that I couldn’t possibly leave without saying hi to my favorite member of the Rogers family.”

Sarah gives a wry smile. “Of course, Mr. Barnes. We’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”

“Bye, Mrs. Rogers! Bye, Steve! See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow,” Steve mumbles.

As soon as the door is closed behind him, he says a quick hello to his mom and rushes to his room. He flops, face first, onto his mattress, burying his face in his pillow. His arms are limp at his sides, and his feet hang off the bed.

There’s a knock at his door a few seconds later.

“Yeah?” he says into the mattress.

“Are you okay?”

“I think I’m dying,” Steve says.

“Oh, of course.” He can tell this has dispelled her worry. “What is it now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Nothing happened with Bucky?”

Steve pauses, considering the question. “No,” he says, still into his pillow.

“Well, try not to die before dinner, okay? I made stew.”

“Okay,” Steve says. “I’ll try to wait.”

“Door closed?”

“Yes please.”

As soon as Steve hears the door latch behind his mom, he groans into his pillow until he’s out of breath.

 

-

 

August is sticky with sweat and exhaustion, like it always is. On top of that, Bucky’s started to grow hair on his chest—dark and sparse and itchy. It’s on his face, too, but his pa taught him how to shave real close along his jaw, where the hair gathers in patches.

When it gets particularly hot, the cotton of his undershirt rubs wrong against the small starts of hairs on the damp skin of his chest, and one day, in the middle of the month and in Steve’s bedroom, he loses his patience. His shirt has been shucked for hours, and his suspenders hang limp at his sides. Now, in a smooth motion, he reaches over behind his head and tugs the thin undershirt over his shoulders and head.

He watches Steve’s pencil freeze in the middle of a line; Steve blinks his eyes a few times, shakes his head minutely, and clears his throat before returning to his drawing, giving a grunt of disapproval, and flipping to a fresh page, which he glares at for a good minute before he starts working again. As soon as he’s set pencil to the page, Bucky interrupts.

He knows it bugs Steve. That’s why he does it.

“Stevie,” he starts. “Hey. Stevie.”

“What, Buck.”

“What’re you drawing?” he gets up and walks closer to Steve, crowds his space, just a little, in what he pretends is an effort to see what he knows will be a blank page. Steve smells like sweat and paper and toothpaste, and Bucky lingers a little longer than he needs to before stepping away so he can throw himself down on the bed next to Steve, cramped and close and too sweaty and pretending not to notice.

“So _secretive,_ Stevie. What’s the big deal? You drawing my handsome face?” Bucky teases with a lopsided grin.

The silence says enough, and when Bucky’s smile drops and he looks up at Steve, it’s the first time he’s seen Steve blush, really and truly. It consumes his whole face.

“You were!” Bucky accuses. “Well now you gotta let me see, Stevie. It’s like my god-given right or something,” he says, fishing for a compelling argument. “I just want to see if you got my summer tan shaded in right.”

“You took your shirt off,” Steve says then. “Ruined the whole drawing. It’s not right anymore.” Without saying anything else, he flips back to the picture, tears it out and hands it to Bucky. “Here.”

Bucky stares at it for a moment. Steve’s been getting really good lately. The drawing looks like Bucky. He’s sure Steve would point out a million flaws, but to Bucky, it just looks impressive. And then, because he’s not sure how to thank Steve, he shoves Steve’s shoulder instead, his grin showing back up. “You better have more of these saved up, pal. This face needs to be documented. You want me to pose next time?”

“I hate you.”

 

-

 

The Rogerses don’t go to Mass, most weeks. Sarah still goes every year on Christmas and Easter, but she never asks Steve to come with her. He does sometimes, just because he knows she doesn’t much like it there and could maybe use the company. Otherwise, he stays home while the Latin drones on down the street, within the horrifyingly high walls of the chapel.

They’d gone when Steve was really young. Every week, at ten in the morning. He attended Sunday school, in a different class than Bucky, who was a year ahead. The Rogers family sat in the back of the church; the Barneses were three pews from the front. They’d been in the same room for years and years, but they had (mercifully, beautifully, thankfully) met far from anything religious.

Or, rather, far away from anything Catholic. Street fights were, after all, somewhat of a religion amongst the youth of Steve and Bucky’s Brooklyn neighborhood.

Years later, when Steve turned ten, Sarah stopped going to church without comment, the same year they stopped going to the memorial each November on Armistice Day. Instead, they began to spend their Novembers and their Sundays at the kitchen table, Sarah mending Steve’s torn clothes and Steve pretending to do his homework.

When Steve gets old enough, Sarah starts letting him walk down to the chapel by himself, at about noon, to wait for Bucky.

The first time he does, he dresses himself up, hair combed and suspenders straight, so that if Mrs. Barnes sees him, she’ll think he attended service, too. It’s impossible to fool Mrs. Barnes, of course, but she is a much stronger believer in blissful ignorance than Steve’s own mother.

He leans against the heavy stone of the building. The Barnes family trickles out near the end--Bella and Billy quiet, Bucky’s head thrown back and one hand shoved in his pants pocket, the other holding onto his youngest sister’s. Becca is two, now, and the light of Bucky’s life. He talks about her nearly non-stop, and Steve loves the way his voice goes soft when he recounts the things she’s said in the last few days. His face lights up, from the inside out, as though perhaps his skin has been infused with gold.

Steve hasn’t told Bucky that he’ll be at the church this week, and Bucky doesn’t see him right away. Becca, however, lets out a shriek of delight as soon as Steve is in her line of sight. She tears away from Bucky and toddles over to Steve. She’s still small enough for Steve to lift her, if he tries hard enough, so he does. She smacks a kiss onto his cheek, her young voice sharp and high in Steve’s bad ear.

“Good to see you, too, Becca!” he laughs. Bucky has caught up with his sister by then, and he’s standing just in front of Steve.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “I was going to walk over to your place as soon as Ma let me.”

Steve shrugs. “My mom said I could come pick you up. Says I’m getting old enough to learn some manners now.”

“She’s got a point.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Yeah, whatever, jerk.” His arms are getting tired, so he gives Becca a final squeeze before handing her back to Bucky, who takes her gently and blows a raspberry against her cheek--loud and uncouth enough to make Mrs. Barnes’s face scrunch up.

She is at the base of the staircase. She hasn’t said hi to Steve, but gives a short wave and a curt smile now when he waves down to her.

“Hello, Mrs. Barnes! You look very nice this afternoon!” She doesn’t speak much English, but the few times Steve has tried his hand at Italian, she stares at him as though he’s grown a second head.

“ _Grazie, Steven_ ,” she calls back, but he gets the sneaking suspicion that she didn’t understand a word he said.

Bucky jogs down the stairs, Becca on his hip. Mrs. Barnes takes Becca from Bucky, and shifts her voice into a register quiet enough that Steve can’t hear. Bucky’s face shifts into his charming smile. The one he wears when he’s trying to get his way, like when he wants Steve to come watch baseball practice. Steve stares instead at his feet, glaring at the ground and ignoring the way that smile makes his chest go light and his lungs feel strangely, uniquely over-full, or the way he can hear the cadences of Bucky’s Italian floating back to him, lilting and far more beautiful than his English.

It doesn’t take too long before Bucky is calling back up to him. “C’mon, Steve!”

Steve waves to the Barnes family as they walk in the opposite direction. He smiles extra wide when Becca waves over her mother’s shoulder, fat baby arm quick and happy as it moves through the air. Bucky laughs when he sees it, shouting out, “ _Ciao, Becca! Ci vediamo!_ ”

And Steve tries not to notice the way Bucky’s arm brushes against his own the whole walk home, or the way his fingers curl around his tie to loosen it. Or the way he leans back against Steve’s pillows when they’re back in the apartment, letting his legs fall open just the slightest bit as he complains about all the homework he has to do that night.

“Mhm,” Steve says.

He sits on the corner farthest from Bucky, and absolutely does not stare.

 

-

 

In October of that year, Bucky kisses a girl for the first time. Her name is Joan. She’s got a messy braid and bangs that curl, the color barely darker than the paleness of her skin.

It happens after lunch, just outside the bathrooms while the halls are empty. The kiss is dry and quick, and all she’d said after was, “Please don’t tell anyone. This is embarrassing,” and Bucky agrees, though he wonders what’s so embarrassing about kissing him.

He tells Steve as soon as school is out.

They’re walking back to Bucky’s house—it’s Tuesday, and Steve always eats with the Barnes family on Tuesday. Bucky’s ma says it would be rude not to invite him.

Bucky spills the news the way he usually does: far more slowly and dramatically than the situation warrants. By the time he gets to the kiss, Steve isn’t giving real responses anymore. Bucky knows he’s listening because Steve always listens, but he’s not really sure how Steve feels about it all until the actual words have been said.

“And then I asked to kiss her and she said yes and I kissed her! Steve, I kissed her! On the mouth!” Bucky says, his arms flying in wide arcs.

Steve stops walking. “I can’t come to dinner tonight,” he says. “I have a doctor’s appointment. Bye,” he says. His eyes are wide and his words less sure than they usually are. He turns and starts walking back towards his own apartment.

“Hey, I’ll come with,” Bucky calls.

“See you tomorrow, Buck!” Steve says over his shoulder, and his pace quickens.

And Bucky can’t feel Joan’s lips on his anymore, and he doesn’t care that no one but Steve is ever going to know. He cares about Steve leaving in the middle of a story, for the first time ever. He cares about the way Steve’s voice hadn’t been steady in its normal way. He can’t feel Joan’s lips on his anymore, but he can feel the squeeze of Steve’s hand when he’s sick, like a fire under his fingertips, the way he always can, no matter what he’s doing.

They don’t talk about the kiss again.

 

-

 

It becomes a point of contention between them, after a while. Not Joan, but Bucky’s kissing in general. By the time a year has passed, Bucky’s kissed four girls. He and Steve are walking to Bucky’s baseball practice--a real one, finally, for the high school team that Bucky’s just joined. Steve sits in the bleachers during practice because he hasn’t got much else to do, anyway. It’s cold out, the lingering October softness finally starting to leak into November, barely a week away. Steve brings three layers to school with him these days, to make sure he’s warm enough not to shake when he sits on the metal bleachers. Bucky always tries to send him home when he gets shaking like that, so Steve stubbornly holds his cold limbs together, forbidding his bones from trying to shake free.

Today, his breath puffing hot in the air, Bucky is telling Steve about Eva. From math class. He’s just started in on describing her freckles (again) when Steve lets out an almighty sigh.

“Yeah,” Steve interrupts. “I get it. She’s the one, she’s beautiful, you’re so in love.” He shoves his face farther into his scarf and grumbles, “You’ll have moved on by tomorrow, Buck.”

“What?”

“Are you even going to ask her out?”

“Yes!”

Steve turns to him. “Oh yeah? When?” he spits.

“Soon,” Bucky says. He grabs the strap of his bag and looks anywhere but at Steve. “You know. When I get around to it.”

“Okay, Bucky.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Forgive me if I have my doubts.” He rolls his eyes and picks up the pace.

“Fine, I’ll do it tomorrow. First thing,” Bucky says.

“Fine. Then maybe I won’t have to hear you yammering anymore.”

“You know, Steve, just because _you’re_ weird—“

“Weird?” Steve’s heart is beating fast, suddenly, like it’s trying to escape through his throat. his words come out strangled, but his fists are forming at his side. “What does that mean?”

“I just mean. You never talk about girls, is all.”

“And that makes me weird?” He’s not sure if it’s anger or hurt that he’s feeling, but he can just barely hear Bucky’s response over the sound of his blood, beating hard against his eardrums.

“Well,” Bucky pauses. Steve doesn’t breathe. “Yeah.”

Oh. So it’s hurt.

Steve gives a tiny nod--barely a movement at all, and he feels like even that is going to knock him over--and doesn’t say anything more. He turns on his heel, and walks back towards his own house. Bucky’s calling out behind him, but Steve doesn’t turn. Instead, he keeps his pace controlled. Won’t let Bucky see him run. He takes overly-controlled steps the whole way home, digging his fingernails into the palms of his fists until he unfurls one to open the door. There are tiny slivers of blood there, bright against his skin. He ignores the way they sting and shoves his key into the lock. It springs open, and he slams it behind him. He’s thankful that his mom isn’t home to question the noise.

He sheds his bag by the door, in a heap, and makes straight for his room.

For a moment, Steve considers throwing himself onto his bed, but instead, he unlatches the rusted and useless locks on his window and forces it to slide upwards. The noise is loud and echoes against the metal of the fire escape outside. He ignores this and clambers over the ledge and onto the escape before his body can adjust to the slight warmth of inside.

He arranges his legs underneath him and sits with his back against the brick of the apartment building, his head tilted back and eyes ahead.

There are noises around him, and the air is bitingly cold, but he does not move. He sits and holds his limbs as close to his body as he can manage, until his mom is sticking her head out the window.

It’s grown dark, somehow, without Steve noticing. She must have just gotten home from work, her hair still pulled back into its uniform bun. She gives a small smile when she sees Steve.

“Thought I might find you out here,” she says. Her voice is relieved. “Everything okay?”

He gives a tight smile in response. She knows not to ask any more.

“Well, there’s someone here to see you. I told him you might not be feeling well and I’d have to check, but it looks like he’s been sitting outside for a while now. Might want to consider letting him in,” she says. Steve is thankful--so thankful--that she doesn’t ask what happened.

He thinks for a moment before finally giving a short nod. His mom smiles and retreats from view. Bucky is there only moments later. She’d probably let him into the house before finding Steve, because she knew exactly what Steve was going to say. Steve can’t really blame her for that. It’s good that she got Bucky out of the cold, anyway.

Bucky pauses for a minute, and says, “Hey.” His voice is quieter than it usually is, and Steve knows then that he’s not so mad at Bucky anymore.

He still doesn’t turn his head. “Hey.”

“Can I join you?”

Steve gives a small shrug, and Bucky lifts the window a little higher and climbs through the frame, legs just slightly too long to do so gracefully. Once he’s outside, he arranges himself next to Steve, legs folded under his body and his arms held in close. He takes a breath before wordlessly holding a small paper bag out to Steve.

“What’s that?” Steve says.

“Why don’t you open the bag?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a pencil.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to give you a pencil.”

Steve hesitates for a moment before lightly taking the bag from Bucky’s hand. When he crinkles it open, there’s a nice drawing pencil inside. Like the ones Steve’s mom always gets him for Christmas. Green and unsharpened and too expensive for Steve to buy most of the time. When he extracts it, gently, from the bag, he holds it in the tips of his fingers. He studies it, not sure what to say.

“I’m sorry, Steve. You’re not weird,” Bucky says. Steve looks at him out of the corner of his eye. He’s curled in on himself, his eyes downcast. He’s picking at the loose seam on his coat, the way he does whenever he gets nervous. Steve stays quiet, until Bucky says, “I’ll get going.” He’s starting to stand up when Steve starts talking.

“It’s not that I don’t think they’re pretty. I just. I don’t know.” He doesn’t. He doesn’t know. They’re beautiful, and he loves to draw them, but when Bucky talks about kissing them, or when he hears the older boys at school saying less appropriate things about them, his stomach turns to stone every time, and he doesn’t know why. He wants Bucky to understand, but he can’t find any words that sound right. _Boys aren’t exciting either, unless they’re you,_ sounds a bit too forward. So he says again, “I don’t know.”

He can feel Bucky looking at him, and he tightens his fists, one holding the pencil and the other gathered around the excess fabric of his pants leg.

“All right,” Bucky says. “I’m sorry I said what I did.”

Steve shrugs. “You want to stay for dinner?”

“Would your mom mind?” Steve can hear the real question. _Would you mind?_

“You should stay. She made soup today.”

“I got some reading to do for class. Okay if I read out loud?”

Steve nods, so Bucky stands up and leans his torso through the window frame. His ass sticks out, and Steve can see that he’s been sitting in the dirt outside their front door--there are grey streaks on his nice khakis. Mrs. Barnes isn’t going to be too happy about that.

He’s about to duck back onto the fire escape, a book in his hand, when Steve asks, “Hey, can you grab my sketchbook and pencil sharpener while you’re in there?”

Bucky does. He hits his head on the way back out, muttering a sharp _shit_ , and shoving Steve lightly when he laughs at Bucky.

“Shut up,” he says. Steve just keeps laughing.

They settle into their work—Bucky finding his page and Steve sharpening the pencil and letting the wood shavings fall to the ground, three floors below—and it’s quieter than normal, but the tension has gone out of the air and Steve’s shoulders.

Without preamble, Bucky starts reading out. _Romeo and Juliet_ today, which Steve knows he’s read at least five times already.

“Don’t you have this one memorized by now?” Steve asks.

“It’s for school this time.” He’d be reading it even if it weren’t for school. He’s two minutes in, Steve’s page just barely marked by the new pencil, when Steve groans.

“Buck, you gotta read the character names out loud, or else I don’t know who’s talking,” Steve says.

“It ruins the rhythm. Can I just do voices instead?”

“Your voices are terrible.”

“They are not!”

Steve just looks at him, his mouth crooked.

Bucky concedes. “Fine, I’ll read the names.”

He gets through the second act, lingering on the balcony scene to tell Steve which parts are his favorites. Steve loves the way Bucky’s accent mars the words a little bit. He loves his crooked smile, and the way he always has to pull his face into weird expressions when he reads the lines.

Instead of admitting that, Steve says, “This play is ridiculous, Bucky.”

“It’s romantic.”

“They’re stupid.”

“They’re in love.” Steve just rolls his eyes at that, so Bucky continues. He gestures to the fire escape railing. “I mean we’re basically on a balcony now. It’s like… _Romeo and Juliet_ but in Brooklyn.” Steve feels his heart shout at that. Bucky continues, “I mean, not that we’re. You know—“

Steve schools his tongue to work, for the words to form, trying to say something, _anything_ , other than what he’s thinking. “Does that make me Juliet?” is what comes out. “I don’t want to be Juliet. She’s annoying.”

“Nah, you can be Romeo,” Bucky answers. He’s grinning now.

“He’s annoying too.”

“Well you’re the one who gets in dumb fights all the time.”

“And you’re the one who talks too much.”

Bucky pushes Steve’s shoulder, and things feel a little more like normal. Bucky’s teeth are chattering and Steve’s hands have gone bone-white by the time Sarah calls them in for dinner, but there’s something warm, too. Steve’s mom smiles when they get inside, and Steve hopes the pink of his cheeks isn’t too obvious.

 

-

 

In a sketchbook tucked under his bed, one that Bucky will never see, is the first sketch Steve made with Bucky’s gift; the lines are fluid and easier than Steve’s usually turn out. The shading almost life-like.

In it, Bucky sits on the fire escape balcony of the small apartment, his hair a little messy from the wind. The book in his lap is forgotten. Instead, he leans back against the railing and looks up, just slightly, his mouth open mid-word as it usually is. His eyebrows are relaxed and he’s lighter than his surroundings. You can barely see the crooked front tooth behind his upper lip, or the thin lines of hair on his forearms.

That sketch sits hidden for years, too honest and bare.

 

-

 

Bucky is confirmed at fifteen. He chose, a little over two years earlier, to opt for this over the bar mitzvah. Steve understood the choice.

A disappointed Pa Barnes was a lot less to handle than a disappointed Ma Barnes. Besides, Bucky’s dad isn’t too attached to his religion anymore, either. The Barnes family celebrates Hanukkah every year, just before a much more intense Christmas courtesy of Mrs. Barnes, but sometimes Bucky will come over to Steve’s mid-morning on Saturday, gleefully reporting that his dad let him skip Shabbat this week.

So it’s not much of a surprise when Bucky opts to please his mom; “I don’t want anything to do with either one,” Bucky had said. “Might as well not get yelled at.”

So when the ceremony rolls around, he asks Steve not to come to it or the dinner afterward. “It’s just gonna be a big waste of time, Steve,” he says.

Steve can see the sadness around the corners of his eyes when he says it, so he doesn’t push the issue. He stays home, and Bucky comes over after.

They sit together, quiet, and Sarah turns on the radio to Bucky’s favorite station. She doesn’t say anything about Bucky’s suit, or his perfectly arranged curls. She ruffles his hair and says, “Nice to see you, Mr. Barnes,” and sits in the living room with her son and his best friend. Steve and Bucky sit on the couch, Steve’s mom in the old armchair, glasses perched on her nose and a book in her hands.

Steve tucks his toes, cold, under Bucky’s thigh and wiggles them. He does this every few seconds until it weasels a laugh out of Bucky, who calls him a punk and shoves at his arm. When he says Steve’s name, his voice sounds almost normal again.

 

-

 

When he’s sixteen, Bucky starts lugging crates at the docks. With the new job come two added benefits.

First, he begins to develop muscles. Real ones. Nothing impressive, not like some of the other men, but his ma complains when he starts to need bigger clothes. He shows off to Steve, who looks unimpressed. He points out each new hair that grows on his broadening chest, and the way his face is losing its young roundness.

The second benefit is Sunday morning work.

In sixteen years, Bucky Barnes has missed Catholic Mass with his ma exactly twice. Once when Billy fell off his bike on the way there and broke his arm bad enough to almost see the bone, and once the morning Becca was born.

But when he starts working at the docks, he volunteers to take the early Sunday morning shifts; he finishes right around eleven, in the middle of Mass. So Bucky offers to start going to evening services; he says he’ll bring Steve. Promises his ma he’ll make sure Steve wears something nice.

Instead of going, Bucky spends every Sunday night at Steve’s, huddled over homework that they barely work on. Billy tells Bucky what was covered at Mass that week, in case his ma asks any questions about it. Sarah Rogers swears to keep the secret, and Bucky suspects it’s because she herself hasn’t gone to Mass since Steve’s dad died.

So he and Steve spend their Sundays in, far from church and far from Ma Barnes’s devout, hawkish gaze.

Those nights are Bucky’s favorite. Especially the ones when he can convince his ma to let him stay at Steve’s overnight; they stay up late enough that Bucky’s eyes droop in class the next day and Steve falls asleep hunched over his desk.

 

-

 

There is one early morning, in the late months of the year, when the air outside pierces through the thin glass windowpanes of the Rogers apartment. One night, where Steve thinks his mom might say something.

Steve wakes up to find Bucky pressed against his back, arm slung around Steve’s waist. He’s shifted in his sleep; they’d ended the night with their backs pressed together, but Bucky never was too good at staying still. It’s not the first time it’s happened. Each time it does, Steve lets himself enjoy the moment a little longer, pretend a little longer. Today, he lets his hand rest, softly, on Bucky’s forearm. He’s pale with winter. Not as light as Steve, but still the dark hairs there stand out more starkly than they do in the tanner months. Steve is just letting his smallest finger curl, slightly, to feel that hair brush against the pad of his finger when—

A shift, somewhere nearby, and Steve’s hand freezes, his head snaps up.

Sarah Rogers stands in the doorway, nurse’s shoes in hand.

_Of course,_ Steve thinks. She’s working the early morning shift today. He should have remembered. But he didn’t, and now she is watching him--she with soft eyes, he with his best friend draped around him. He wants to open his mouth, to say something, but he’s afraid it will wake Bucky and make the situation worse. And, besides, his lips feel sealed together.

He waits for her to break the silence instead.

She doesn’t. She maintains her soft smile (soft eyes, soft shoulders), and slips out the front door. Turns the knob when she pulls the door closed, so it doesn’t make too loud a sound.

Steve breathes, deeply, and marvels that his heart has not woken Bucky up. Its beat does not slow, not for quite some time, and when it does, Steve’s hand has settled once more in the down on Bucky’s arm. Bucky wakes up a few hours later, and, as he always does, pretends to roll over first. Steve yawns, as though he hasn’t been awake for hours. Bucky won’t meet his eyes for the first few moments of the day. Steve wonders, but--

It wears off. Bucky begins his daily yammering, but neither of them really says a thing.

 

-

 

They go on like this, for a few years. Settling deeper into loving each other. Silently oblivious.

 

-

 

When Steve graduates high school, Bucky drags him to Coney Island.

“You have to celebrate somehow, Steve!” Bucky insists as he pays their train fare. He can nearly feel Steve’s eyes rolling. It’s a skill Steve and Bella have in common—the ability to be irritated the very instant Bucky opens his mouth.

“My mom’s making pie,” Steve says.

“Is there some rule saying you can’t have pie and Coney Island?”

Steve sighs. “How are we still friends?” he asks. There’s no heat in his words. His mouth is beginning to quirk up at the right edge, and Bucky knows that means he’s given into the plan.

“Because I’m a handsome devil,” Bucky says. He throws his arm around Steve’s slim shoulders and draws him in closer. “You’d be so bored without me.”

“I’m not the one who used to do English homework for fun, thank you.”

Bucky laughs. “Okay, you’d be significantly more beaten up and know a lot less algebra.”

“Oh, darn,” Steve says with a grin. “No algebra? Whatever would I do?”

“Flunk high school, probably,” Bucky says.

“That’s a risk I was willing to take.”

“I know. And aren’t you glad now that you didn’t?”

“Well if I’d flunked, I probably wouldn’t be in this situation right now, so you know? I’m actually really regretting my decision.” Steve says. He elbows Bucky in the side, and Bucky elbows him back. By the time the train arrives, they’re laughing loud enough to get stares, and Bucky’s curls have come a bit loose from their pomade. Steve gripes as they get on the train, and then the whole way there.

When Bucky drags him, immediately, to the line in front of the Cyclone, Steve finishes his complaining with a succinct, “I’m going to throw up, aren’t I?”

“No way!” Bucky assures him.

Steve throws up.

On the train back, Steve, with his head between his knees and his voice flat and over-loud, “Remind me to never listen to you again, you jerk.”

“Yeah, sure, punk. Can do.” Bucky pats Steve’s shoulder until they pull into their station. He walks Steve home with an arm around his waist, holding him up, and drags him up the stairs to the apartment Steve shares with his mom.

When Sarah Rogers opens the door, her eyes go soft immediately.

“He threw up, didn’t he?”

“I threw up,” Steve affirms. “Also, Bucky is an ass.”

Sarah laughs and waves them both inside. She gets a plate for Bucky, a damp washcloth and a trash can for Steve.

“Look on the bright side, pal,” Bucky says. “I get your share of pie now!”

The glare Steve gives Bucky is withering, but he has a large kitchen washcloth held against his forehead, and the sight is too funny to be threatening. Bucky laughs, and Sarah follows. Steve joins in after a few moments, and Bucky thinks the day didn’t turn out too badly, after all.

 

-

 

Steve takes odd jobs, mostly, and a few shifts at the corner store next to the apartment he shares with his mom. He takes inventory on Mondays and Thursdays, meticulously counting the cartons of cigarettes, the stacks of produce crates, the packs of chewing gum. He sifts through these, picking out anything that’s molding or overly bruised, and weighing the wasted product.

It’s not an exciting job, but he gets to spend most of his shifts in the back, or cleaning the store. He doesn’t talk to customers most of the time; he leaves that to Mr. O’Malley, who owns the store and used to go to church with Steve’s parents. Every so often, he’ll say something about Steve’s dad. When this happens, Steve pastes a cardboard smile to his face, nods his head as though he remembers anything about his dad, until Mr. O’Malley moves on.

It’s a good job, all things told. It pays decently enough, and most of the place is heated. The storeroom is cold in the winters, but nothing like the biting air outside. It’s nothing compared to the paper route Steve had taken for a few months, when he was sixteen.

And then there are the signs.

Every so often, Mr. O’Malley decides he wants to change the street display--a chalkboard sign, years old and impossible to erase completely. On these mornings, the sign will be set up for Steve on the rickety table in the back room, and Mr. O’Malley will hand him the small tray of decrepit chalk when Steve clocks in. Steve will settle himself on the tall wooden stool and meticulously clean the chalkboard as best he can, erasing whatever he last drew. Then, when he’s satisfied that it’s as clear as it’s going to get, he takes a used receipt slip and makes a quick pencil sketch (or two, or three, depending on the number of words needed and how determined Steve is feeling).

He doesn’t much like working with chalk. The dust gets in his lungs, makes it hard to breathe. And this isn’t nice chalk, either. It scratches against the too-old blackboard, and makes inconsistent, slightly jagged marks. Steve does what he can.

His handwriting, on a normal day, is a bit of a mess. Fast, and careless, but on these signs, he makes the letters curve perfectly. Fills them in carefully, uses the edge of a paper to make sure the lines of text are straight. The drawings that go alongside the words are neat; they’re not as nice as drawing people, to be sure, but they’re easy. Quiet, calm.

Mr. O’Malley gives him a small tip at the ends of these days. He tells his mom, and when she comes home from her next shift, she always tells him that she walked by the store. That she loves what he’s done. She picks out something each time, usually something small, to compliment. _I liked the leaf on the apple, Steve,_ or, _You got the color of the cherries exactly._

 

-

 

Sometimes, when he’s walking home from work, a man or two will call out to Bucky. It’s always something about grabbing a drink, or something a bit more direct.

When he’s alone, Bucky politely declines, makes light conversation before moving on. When Steve’s walking with him, Bucky turns the charm on a bit more. It gets Steve flustered every time.

Once, a few weeks after Bucky’s turned twenty, there’s a smallish man, with blond hair and a frame like Steve’s, who shouts something particularly lewd in Bucky’s direction. On a whim, Bucky calls back, “You know, sir? I’d love to take you up on that offer, but y’see, I’ve gotta get my friend here home safe. Maybe tomorrow!” He waves before moving along. Steve’s face is red and his eyes are wide.

“He seemed like a nice fella,” Bucky says. He tries—fails—to hold back his laughter.

“Are you kidding?”

Bucky just shrugs. “Hey, does your mom have anything around to eat? I’m starved and Ma says I’m not allowed to eat anything else from our kitchen until payday.”

Steve looks like maybe he wants to challenge Bucky on the subject change, and Bucky almost hopes he does. He almost hopes Steve asks him about this thing they’ve been dancing around for years. But Steve doesn’t. He just shakes his head, exasperated, and sighs something about Bucky’s hollow leg.

 

-

 

In the fall that year, when the store is nearly drowning in New York apples, Mr. O’Malley hands Steve a small burlap bag, filled with the too-bruised batch. Steve nearly turns them down, but remembers Bucky moaning a few weeks ago about how much he wished Steve’s mom could make them that pie she used to make every year. So he takes the bag, and when he walks out onto the street, Bucky is leaning against the brick, just to the right of the door. Steve raises his eyebrows when he sees him; Bucky usually didn’t get out of work until long after Steve.

“Hey!” he greets. “What’s in the bag?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work still?”

“Moved my shifts,” he says, and pushes himself off the wall. He stoops closer to Steve, craning his neck to see inside the bag.

“Why?”

“Because you work the early shifts.”

“So?”

“So when I take the late shifts, I never see you,” Bucky says.

As though it’s a given that they’d take each other into account. And, in a way, Steve thinks, maybe it is. He opens the bag for Bucky to see.

“Apples. Thought we could as my mom to make that pie.”

Bucky’s face lights up, and he tilts his head backwards. His neck is bared, still summer-tan, and Steve grips the bag tighter. Bucky raises his arms in triumph before tossing one around Steve’s shoulders. “Steve, have I ever told you how much I love you?”

“They’re apples,” Steve says.

“And with any luck, they’ll be a pie in a few hours. You are a beautiful, beautiful man, Steve Rogers.”

His hand burns hot on Steve’s shoulder.

 

-

 

They scrape their paychecks together for weeks until they can afford tickets to the Dodgers game. The seats are terrible, and hard against their asses, so far away that Bucky can barely see the players’ numbers on the jerseys. Steve probably can’t, but he yells at them anyway.

The stadium is loud, and smells somewhat of hotdogs and feet. Bucky loves it.

He loves Steve’s anger beside him, perched on his knees on the bleachers and jabbing his finger to the beat of his syllables. Loves the pink of Steve’s face when he’s angry, when he’s happy, when he’s frustrated. Loves the way Steve’s feet are crossed at the ankles behind him, hanging off the back of his seat. Loves the way his shirt has come untucked on the right side, the way Bucky can see the calluses on that hand from the way Steve holds his pencils.

And he loves the cheers of the crowd, the boos when their team is losing.

It’s a perfect day. A little too hot and humid for May, and with the threat of rain heavy in the air. Steve’s voice ringing in his ear, his elbow perched on Bucky’s shoulder when the game is slow.

It’s a perfect day, until.

When they get back from the game, their shirts sweat-stained and limp, Steve’s apartment is silent, the way it always is when it’s empty. Mrs. Rogers is working a double today, so Bucky and Steve agreed earlier that they’d make dinner as a surprise. They’d checked for the ingredients before leaving, though they know it’ll all burn anyway. It’s still worth a try.

They’re just getting the pans out when, from the back of the house, there is an almighty cough.

Steve freezes.

“Mrs. Rogers?” Bucky calls, when Steve can’t.

 

She got sent home from work, when she couldn’t keep her coughs inside anymore. The results on the sputum test aren’t in just yet, she says, but by the way her smile looks, Bucky knows she’s only keeping the word inside her mouth for Steve’s sake.

It’s tuberculosis. It is, and they all know, but they’ll let Steve pretend, because that’s what they always do, isn’t it? Mr. Barnes and Mrs. Rogers? They put Steve first.

 

Steve and Bucky sleep there for the night. Steve is quiet, and he falls asleep early. He says goodnight to his mom like he does every night, with no extra words. From the way she squeezes her son, Bucky can tell she’s trying to put a lot into the hug. He looks away. It doesn’t seem right, somehow, to be watching this.

And then, later--when Steve is asleep, face pressed into the cushions of the couch and eyebrows drawn down, fighting even in his sleep--Bucky checks on Mrs. Rogers, to see if she needs anything. She’s been coughing, loud enough to be heard through her closed door, for hours now. He brings her a glass of water and knocks gently on the door.

The _come in_ is ragged. She’s trying to sound normal, but Bucky can barely hear her accent anymore, and it’s got him worried.

“Hi, Mrs. Rogers.”

“Mr. Barnes.”

“Thought you might want some water.”

She nods, and takes it from him. Her hands look small, suddenly. Smaller than Bucky has ever seen them.

He hovers in the doorway, until she waves him in. He sits in the chair next to her bed. It creaks under his weight.

“You have a minute?” she asks. Her voice is a little clearer now; her eyes, surrounded by bruise-like bags and exhaustion, are still bright the way they’ve always been.

He nods. “I’ve got a million minutes for a woman as beautiful as you, Mrs. Rogers.”

She laughs. He’s always loved making her laugh. Like she liked him not just because he was Steve’s friend, but because he was Bucky, and she liked that about him. She was one of maybe three people, Bucky figured, who could say that--that they really liked Bucky. And one was his sister, who didn’t count.

“What’s on your mind?” she says.

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

She nods. “That’s understandable. You know,” she starts. It looks like she loses her train of thought, and Bucky’s about to interject, but she starts back up again. “When you and Steve were so young, just after you met, he hunted in this apartment for days.”

“What?”

“Looking for pennies to scrape together, to buy you that damn yo-yo he got you. Do you remember that?”

“I remember,” Bucky says.

“He said your mom had thrown yours out, and that you were real torn up about it.”

“I wanted to be the best in the world. Really, I just wanted to be better than Bella, but that didn’t sound as impressive.”

“Steve said you were terrible.”

Bucky barks out a laugh. “Sounds about right.”

“He nearly came out of his skin when he found that last penny. I thought he was going to pass out, he was so excited.”

“He told me he found the yo-yo in a kitchen drawer.”

Sarah smiles. “Well, that’s Steve for you. Never could bear to disappoint you, that boy.”

Bucky’s stomach goes a little light at that, and he forces it under control. “I don’t know, I think his math tests were pretty disappointing, and he seemed alright with that.”

He says it mostly to make Sarah laugh, and it works. She holds out her hand, palm up, and Bucky takes it in his own. Her palm is nearly as rough and callused as his, but small and thin like Steve’s. She has that same pale skin, too, the veins showing through on her wrist. Bucky’s hand feels dirty against hers, but he holds on tight. Maybe for her benefit, but probably for his own, because he feels a bit like he’s suffocating, the air going out of the room a bit more every time Sarah Rogers’s thin chest heaves with coughing; it looks too much like Steve, during the bad winters.

He stays like that for hours, talking to Mrs. Rogers until he dozes off with his hand in hers and his head bowed and rested on the edge of her mattress.

 

When he wakes up in the morning, he’s in the living room, on the ground in front of the couch, where Steve still sleeps. He vaguely remembers moving out here, at Sarah’s insistence.

Sarah.

The house is silent, and Bucky’s throat closes.

He scrambles into standing and rushes back to her room.

It’s empty.

When he comes back out to the living room, Steve is holding a piece of paper, crowded with writing.

“Steve?” Bucky asks. Tentative.

“She says to go to your house for a few nights. They’re admitting her.”

So they pack a bag for Steve, leave the door locked behind them and a key hidden on the porch. And Steve doesn’t say another word.

 

For days.

By the time the third rolls around with no news from Mrs. Rogers and not a single word from Steve, Bucky stops trying to talk to him. Instead, he sits within earshot of Steve all day, in case he decides he wants to talk, and he minds his own business. He reads book after book after book, trying to distract himself from the worry. He helps his ma with dinner, for the first time since she gave up on their cooking lessons when he was ten. Practices his Italian with Billy, who has always been better at it than Bucky. He helps Becca with her math homework--the same times tables he’d been doing the day he met Steve. And he listens to Bella talk about her date that night--with a nice Italian boy their ma picked out for her.

That starts the _why-haven’t-you-brought-anyone-home-yet-Bucky_ conversation, and Bucky thinks that even if he did, they certainly wouldn’t be a nice Italian girl. No, there won’t be any nice Italian girls for Bucky.

When he brushes the questions off, his ma starts throwing glances at Steve (unmoving, and on the couch, as he has been all day, all week) again, and Bucky decides to get out of the house. To give himself and everyone else a break. He volunteers to get the groceries for dinner, and asks to take Becca with him. She leaps at the offer, eager to get away from her homework.

But when they get outside, Bucky just collapses onto the steps and rests his head in his hands, elbows on his knees.

 

Becca, bless her heart, doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She puts her hand on his shoulder and, in that way that only a twelve-year-old can, assures him things are going to be alright, and really means it, really thinks it’s true.

 

He tells his sister that day. About Steve, about the way Bucky is. She nods her head solemnly when he begs her not to tell their ma, though he figures she probably already knows. Figures their whole family probably knows, has seen him smile at Steve enough times. His ma will never say it, though, and Bucky figures it’s best to let her keep that illusion, if she wants to.

As long as someone knows, Bucky thinks, there’s a chance this truth won’t devour him whole.

It’s a lie, though, he knows. It doesn’t feel any better after he says the words.

Steve is still inside, curled up on the couch and refusing to talk to him, and he will never know.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?

 

-

 

The funeral is on a Thursday.

_Sarah Rogers is survived by one son_ , they say. _She will be deeply missed._

 

-

 

He remembers Bucky reading to him, once. Shakespeare. Always Shakespeare, with Bucky. Steve can’t remember which play it was, but Bucky had repeated the words so many times.

_The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes._

One of Bucky’s favorite lines, and now, walking home from his mother’s poorly-attended funeral, they won’t stop marching across his thoughts.

And he hasn’t spoken since his mother died, wanted her to still be the last person he spoke to, but now what he wants, desperately, is for Bucky to be there, just so Steve can tell him that Shakespeare is a liar. There are no heavenly blazes, there is nothing but quiet, and pain like a lit candle wick. Flaring at first, then burning low, until the fire catches on the burnt leftovers that haven’t fallen--and then a jump, a brief reminder of that early brightness, until it calms again.

As if it’s making sure you don’t forget how much it hurts.

But Bucky is not here, so Steve quietly makes his peace with the lying poet.

Maybe he had lost someone, too.

Maybe he hadn’t been lying to anyone but himself.

 

-

 

They move in together two weeks later, the moment Bucky can get his things packed up. His ma refuses to help, so Steve comes by. It’s quieter between them, quieter than Steve would like, but he can’t bring himself to break it.

Not until they’re finally in their apartment, and he begins to laugh.

It’s the first time he has, really, in weeks. A month, probably.

The place is a shithole.

There isn’t a single redeeming quality--one tiny sink, no drying rack. One bathroom, with a shabby excuse for a door. One bed, big enough for the both of them but endlessly creaky. One chair, taken from Steve’s old apartment with his mom. No bookshelves, not even a terrible one, and so Bucky will have to stack his books on the ground, amongst Steve’s sketchbooks. One window, onto a rickety fire escape, and a second glassless one between the kitchen and the bedroom. You couldn’t so much as sniff in one corner of the apartment without being heard on the opposite side.

The bathtub is in the center of the kitchen, with a wooden board lain across the top, as though that makes it a table.

It’s this that makes Steve laugh, in the end. The ridiculous tub, claw-footed and stained, out in the open.

He has to set down the box he’s been carrying, and he bends over to put his hands on his knees. Bucky joins in, too, before too long. He leans on Steve’s shoulder, and says, voice light, “Well, fuck, Stevie. We’re in for it, aren’t we?”

 

-

 

In theory, Steve does the cooking and Bucky does the dishes. That’s the agreement they settled on, when they’d moved in, because Steve works closer by and gets home earlier.

Bucky clocks out each day (“Well, I’d love to get drinks with you fellas, but I gotta skedaddle. I’ve got dinner waiting for me at home!”) and makes the trek from the docks back to their apartment building.

What he really has is Steve waiting for him at home--usually without dinner. Bucky usually walks in to find a pot on the stove, the water nearly completely boiled off, and Steve curled up in one of the chairs. He’s always in one of those damn undershirts he wears under his too-big button-ups. Suspenders hanging at his sides. Legs tucked up at the oddest angles. Face concentrated, voice flat when he greets Bucky. Shoulders tense and hunched--Bucky’s never seen Steve without those tense shoulders.

“Dinner?” Bucky asks.

“Thought potatoes, maybe.”

“Fuckin’ Irish and your potatoes,” Bucky says. “You don’t want any tomatoes? Garlic? Olive oil? Basil? Nothing?”

It’s then that Steve looks up from his sketchbook, with his mouth twisted in amusement. “You want to invite your ma over to cook for us? I’m sure she’d be happy to hear about everything you’ve learned at church since moving out.”

“Boiled potatoes it is,” Bucky says, and refills the pot.

 

-

 

Bucky goes out on the weekends, sometimes, and he always ends up laying on the floor of their bathroom, Steve sitting next to him. He holds Steve’s ankle--thin, pale, less soft than it looks--and groans until either his stomach or his exhaustion wins out.

When he wakes up the next morning, he remembers vividly the way his thumb fit so perfectly along the curve of Steve’s ankle bone, the comforting weight of Steve’s hand between Bucky’s shoulder blades. A bit more vaguely, he remembers his loose tongue, and the way it slurred against his newly-brushed teeth. He tries to remember whether he’d manage to curl his thoughts into words, and whether Steve had been listening.

 

-

 

The bed, which had looked plenty big when they’d moved in, turns out to be rather small in practice. The summer months are sweat-sticky, and the winters are over-crowded with worn blankets.

Bucky talks in his sleep, Steve learns.

Of course, he’s slept next to Bucky plenty of times. But those had been times when they’d stayed up late talking, when Steve had been exhausted, and had fallen asleep easy.

They had not been the nights when Steve lay awake, unable to close his eyes, unable to stop himself from thinking. On these nights, Steve is awake long after Bucky, who often collapses as soon as he’s home from work and has shoveled something resembling food into his mouth.

And so Steve has plenty of time to hear the things Bucky says.

He tries not to listen. Tries not to like the way his name sounds in Bucky’s mouth on those nights.

 

-

 

The chair is the only part of the apartment that feels normal at first. It’s sprung and creaky, but it’s familiar. When Steve isn’t home, Bucky drapes his legs over the arm and hunkers down to read the same tattered books he read when the chair was at its last home. They smell old, and comfortable, like something finally recognizable. The chair, too, always holds the lingering smell of Steve, more than anywhere else in the apartment, and Bucky wraps himself in it.

When Steve is home, he claims the chair. Bucky doesn’t put up a fight, instead electing to lay on the bed, book held aloft above his head. He always lays with his head at the foot of the bed, so that he can reach out and tap Steve to get his attention, when he wants to read something particularly good out loud.

“Steve, listen to this,” he says, every time, and Steve will give a sound of assent.

“‘Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,’” he reads, though he’s read it again and again, for a decade now, enough for even Steve, too, to have committed it to memory.

“ _Romeo and Juliet_ again?”

“‘What is it else?’” Bucky continues, and he shifts his gaze to watch Steve roll his eyes. When Steve’s looking at him again, Bucky finishes. “‘A madness most discreet.’”

 

-

 

The way their books and sketchbooks and occasional newspapers are stacked around the apartment, Steve’s drawings get mixed in with Bucky’s books more often than not.

Some of them slip between the pages, to be found days or months or decades later.

 

-

 

Steve likes to leave the windows open, when they can.

Of course, he’s allergic to most everything outside, but the same could be said for everything inside. He doesn’t like the stuffy air of the apartment, or the way it gets so dark when the sun goes down. It feels too stifled, like he can’t breathe.

Bucky teases him when the weather starts to turn cold and he walks into the apartment to find Steve huddled in the chair, under a pile of blankets, the window wide open and letting in the wind and drizzle.

“You tryin’ to catch your death, Stevie?” he asks as toes his boots off at the door.

Steve says nothing but flips Bucky the bird. Without looking, Bucky says, “You’ve got the _fuck you_ eyes right now, don’t you?” He turns around, laughs. “You want me to leave this open?” he says.

Steve nods. It’s a quiet day, and he knows Bucky understands. He puts water on the stove, tosses some salt in, and flops onto the bed. Steve moves only his eyes during the whole process, following Bucky until he’s immobile. Then, when Bucky has settled, Steve reaches one foot out from his fortress, and taps it against Bucky’s nearest shin.

Bucky smiles--Steve can see it in the corner of his lips, and lifts his head just enough to see Steve. His chin crinkles until there are three, four of them, the skin shaved smooth but slightly less so than it had been hours ago when he’d left for work. He smiles that quiet smile.

“You want to listen to the radio?” he asks. “I’m exhausted.”

“Okay,” Steve says.

Bucky turns the stove off. They’ll both fall asleep before they can get through dinner, anyway. He turns the radio on, low, and they settle into bed next to each other.

The window stays open. Bucky lies close under the blankets.

 

-

 

The bathtub is just inside the front door and impossible to move. Of course, it causes its fair share of awkward moments.

 

-

 

And then there are the calm nights. The ones where things feel a little less confusing--just comfortable. Just Steve, and Bucky, and their terrible, cramped, mold-scented apartment. They are some of the happiest of Bucky’s life and, he suspects, Steve’s as well.

They both get off work early on Tuesdays, which are, coincidentally, also payday for Bucky. He buys them something nicer for dinner on Tuesdays. Something fresh, with real flavor. Something they have to shake real spices onto, instead of settling for the grimy salt of an aluminum can. Neither of them is much of a cook, of course, but they get better as the months pass.

It feels, somehow, like they’ve lived there forever. Like nights at Sarah Rogers’s apartment is are a distant memory, like Bucky has only ever shared a room with Steve.

 

-

 

It lasts until December.

They’re in art class-- _painting,_ of all things. Bucky can’t even hold a damn _pencil_ right. It’s cold out, but the snow has mercifully stopped, muddied piles of the stuff at the curbs, slush on the sidewalks. The wind, however, is still freezing--fast and cruel. They’ve just barely settled themselves into their seats when someone says it.

“You hear about Hawaii?”

Bucky can practically feel Steve straightening to attention in the seat next to him, his ears perking up. Bucky fixes his eyes on the art materials in front of him, the free ones students could use. They hadn’t had the money for anything fancy. Besides, Bucky was only here because Steve wanted to be, and Bucky didn’t like the idea of Steve taking night classes alone across town in the middle of winter.

He studies them now. The wood of the paintbrush is covered in the dried, rubbery paint of classes past. The bristles don’t all point in the right direction. The paints themselves are all near-empty tubes and caked-on lids. The tables tilt, and not in the way they should. The seats are wood. They make Bucky’s ass go numb every week. The lighting is over-bright, medicinal, and reminds Bucky of sitting next to Steve in the hospital. And the clock is too loud, each sentence ticking past, like a countdown to the words Bucky knows, certain and heavy and terrible, are about to come bounding from between Steve’s lips.

“Bucky, are you _hearing_ this?” he asks.

“No.”

“There was an attack, Buck. In _Hawaii._ ”

“Yeah?” Bucky asks. As though he doesn’t know what this means. As though he doesn’t know what Steve will have to say about it. As though there isn’t a storm inside his head right now, just behind his eyes, his teeth.

“So that means we’re going,” Steve says, and when Bucky doesn’t respond ( _eyes on the table, Bucky, hands clamped tight between your knees, breathing steady_ ), Steve elaborates. “Roosevelt is going to call for a declaration. We’re going to war, Buck. I told you!”

And he did, over and over again. And Bucky did not listen.

Now, all he can listen to is the rushing in his ears, and Steve’s vindication next to him.

 

Before Brooklyn, Bucky’s family was in Indiana. They moved when his dad finally left the army and his ma said she wanted to find somewhere they could settle. With plenty of people and not so many uniforms. She said she was sick of army khaki.

Years later, when Bucky would join the army, she would cry the first time she sees him in uniform.

 

He promises to train Steve, as much as he can. It’s a bit of a joke--all Bucky knows is hefting boxes, and fishing Steve from fights. But he has some muscle and an inability to deny Steve anything, so he finds himself in the gym every night.

Steve doesn’t have much patience for any of it, and they’re in the recruitment offices before even two weeks have passed. Steve looks the same as he did when they started, and worse, he’s caught a cold. But he holds himself proudly the whole way over. He marches up to take a registration form, and fills it out confidently, his thin body perched on the very edge of his seat, clipboard teetering on his knees. Bucky doesn’t fill out his own form, yet; Steve wants to go first, says it’s not fair if they’ve got Bucky in their heads when they see him. (Bucky asks what this means, but Steve just shrugs, his eyebrows drawn, and mumbles something about Bucky being tall.)

Bucky knows what’s going to happen, of course. Steve is small, and he’s got nearly every ailment on the checklist. Bucky had seen him skipping some of the check marks, but even with those lies, there had been far too much black in the medical history section of his papers.

Bucky knows what’s going to happen. But his hands are shaking, his heart is racing, his vision is blurred, up until the moment Steve steps back into the waiting room. And then his heart is still, his vision too sharp, his body immobile, until he sees the angry set of Steve’s face and knows he was right.

Steve shoves the sheet-- _4F_ \--at Bucky and storms out of the office.

Bucky follows, trying to think what to say; Steve spares him the trouble.

“You know what? I think that doctor was just wrong. He’s not the only one in town, right?” he says.

“Well,” Bucky starts. “No, but--”

“Right. So I’ll just try again.”

“That’s not how it works, Steve.”

“That’s how it’s going to work.”

It’s no use, fighting with Steve when he gets like this. So Bucky closes his mouth and lets Steve talk. It’s the whole ride home--every last detail of the five-minute visit, every little reason Steve can think of that the doctor was wrong. He speaks loud enough that the other commuters start to look, but Bucky can’t quite bring himself to care. He isn’t even wholly listening to Steve.

It’s a shame, of course, to see Steve so upset. But there’s a part of him, somewhere a bit closer to the surface than Bucky would like to admit, that is only relieved. That he won’t have to enlist, that Steve never will. He’ll stay home, here with Steve, in the relatively safe discomfort of their decrepit apartment.

He’ll be okay.

Steve will be okay.

 

The cruel humor of it all, of course, is the letter that comes in the mail, barely a month later.

_“_ _ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION.”_

Steve finds it first.

_“_ _The President of the United States, to James Buchanan Barnes.”_

His name stamped, in the same type as the date. Black, damning ink.

_“_ _Greeting: Having submitted yourself to a local board composed of your neighbors for the purposes of determining your availability for training and service in the land or naval forces of the United States, you are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service therein._

_“You will, therefore, report to the local board named above at GRAND CENTRAL RAILROAD STATION at 7:15AM, on the 21st day of JANUARY, 1942._

_“This local board will furnish transportation to an induction station. You will there be examined, and, if accepted for training and service, you will then be inducted into the land or naval forces._

_“Persons reporting to the induction station in some instances may be rejected for physical or other reasons. It is well to keep this in mind in arranging your affairs, to prevent any undue hardship if you are rejected at the induction station. If you are employed, you should advise your employer of this notice and the possibility that you might not be accepted at the induction station. Your employer can then be prepared to replace you if you are accepted, or to continue your employment if you are rejected._

_“Willful failure to report promptly to this local board at the hour and on the day named on this notice is a violation of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, as amended, and subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment._

_“If you are so far removed from your own local board that reporting in compliance with this order will be a serious hardship and you desire to report to a local board in the area of which you are now located, go immediately to that local board and make written request for transfer of your delivery for induction, taking this order with you.”_

 

It’s signed by a man Bucky does not know, but whose signature he immediately memorizes, like it’s the signature on a death certificate.

 

He shows up on January 21st, and he leaves his family and Steve behind him, his ma and Becca crying, Bella and Billy trembling, his father stony; Steve with his hand raised in goodbye, Bucky’s first letter tucked in his coat pocket.

 

 


	2. Part Two.

_Part Two._

(Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid.)

 

Steve opens the letter when he gets back to their (too quiet, too empty) apartment.

Bucky’s handwriting is terrible as always, smudges tracking where his left hand dragged across the letters after he wrote them. Some in pencil, some in pen, like he wrote it in multiple sittings. Dated a week ago.

Steve takes a breath, and folds himself onto the bed, the same spot where Bucky always reads (read, used to read). He tries to arrange his body into the exact position of Bucky’s, the one he’s sketched so many times, right ankle resting on bent left knee, head tilted back to read.

His body is too small for the space. He is swimming, drowning, in all this space.

 

-

 

_January 15, 1942_

_Dear Steve,_

_I figured it’d happen eventually, but I have to tell you, I wasn’t ready just yet. I know you’re so ready to go off and protect our country and all that, but I’m just not, Steve. Not the way you are. But I guess I don’t got a choice now._

_I’m not sure why I’m writing this letter._

_No, that’s not really true. I know why I’m writing it, I just don’t think it’s going to do much good, in the grand scheme of things. You’re still not going to know what I’m trying to say, because I don’t know how to say it right. It’s like this, I guess._

_Remember that first time you got real sick? Well, not the first time you got sick. The first time I was around for it. We were young and stupid, I don’t think Becca had even been born yet. You were taller than me still, I think. And you never looked small, even when you were sick. Does that make sense? People usually look so small when they’re sick. Billy got pneumonia, once, when he was real little. Way before I knew you. He was real fat when he was a baby, all round and soft the way babies should be, you know? And tall. Taller than I was when I was that young, at least. So when he was three or four, and he was in bed for so long, it was so scary to see him like that. Small, and even quieter than usual, like if I stopped looking at him, he might disappear. Everyone would forget his name, I’d be the only one who remembered. So I kept looking at him. All day, unless I was at school and my ma could stay with him. Then I’d come home and watch him all night long. I hardly slept, Steve. I don’t know if I ever told you about this. Probably didn’t. You know Billy--he’s not the sick type. Becca is the only one I usually have to worry about. Bella and Billy? They’re better off than me now, probably. But during that week, Billy scared me._

_I’m rambling now, aren’t I? I always do that._

_Point is, I never felt like that with you. You scared me, sure. Scared me shitless. But you never looked small. You looked like you were just real angry about the whole situation. Like the universe had wronged you, making you stay in that bed. I like that about you, Steve. You’re so angry, all the time. I don’t know how you do it. Anger like that takes so much energy, and I just don’t have it._

_But you were so angry, and so hard around the edges, even when you were in bed for weeks. You even slept angry. I wish you could see yourself sleep. Your eyebrows get all low and your mouth turns down at the corners. I wonder if your lips are sore when you wake up, you know? Like the way a mouth gets when it’s been smiling too much, except yours is a frown and you don’t know you’re doing it._

_Anyways. The only time you were soft was when you were squeezing my hand._

_I like our code. One for yes, two for no. One for yes, two for no._

_My ma kept asking if I was ready, you know. And I leave tomorrow (suppose the date’s wrong on this letter now), and I didn’t know what to tell her. She was crying, right into her risotto, and she kept asking if I was ready, and I kept nodding my head yes._

_And you know what I was wishing that whole time, Steve?_

_I was sitting there wishing you were there, holding my hand, so I could squeeze it twice. Two for no._

_I kept wishing that like an idiot, and I almost grabbed your hand when I came home, so I could say it without saying it. But I didn’t, and you’re asleep now, and I leave in the morning, and I am still not ready, Steve._

_I guess I have to be now, huh?_

_The food better be good, Stevie. At least it can’t be any worse than yours._

 

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

 

-

 

Training is terrible.

He gets sent to Wisconsin, of all places. It’s cold there, colder even than it had been in the city. The barracks are heated, but the running courses are not. The sweat cools against Bucky’s skin. Clammy and slightly feverish, sticky against his training uniform.

Oh, Bucky makes friends, sure. Quickly, the way he always has--loud men, who smell like dirt and sweat the way Bucky probably does, too. And he doesn’t do too poorly, either. He can shoot a lot better than most of the others, and he picks it up quickly. Which, of course, doesn’t go unnoticed.

He talks to the men he was sent here with, gets to know a few pretty well; they’re blank, a bit, to Bucky. It’s not fair, Bucky supposes, with Steve so far away. No one’s going to be anything but blank when it’s like this.

And the cruel thing is, even they don’t stick around.

They get sent off west. Bucky’s kept behind, a nicer gun placed in his hand.

 

-

 

His family sends him letters in big envelopes, all five of their missives combined; most of them are one page or less, but Becca’s always fatten the stack considerably.

 

_Dear James,_

_Your sister is seeing the Martinelli boy down the street. He is a very nice boy. Handsome. Short, good for Isabella. He is polite, and I invite him to dinner this week. Your father and I think he is a good match for her. He sits with us at Mass. He has a sister. She is your age. You should talk._

_William is well. He is studying French now. I tell him he doesn’t need it. He knows Italian._

_Rebecca misses you. She is quiet._

_Be safe._

 

_Love,_

_Ma_

 

 

_Dear Bucky,_

_First things first, your mother wants me to apologize for the short letter. She wrote one in Italian last time, but then the whole bundle got sent back to us--they didn’t even send you the ones in English. I’m not sure why they don’t just get a damn translator to check the letters in other languages, but they say we have to stick to English. Your mother wanted to make sure you knew, so you wouldn’t think her short letter was rude. We tried to translate one for her, but you know how stubborn your mother can get. Says she won’t be out-smarted by the “ridiculous government of this ridiculous country.”_

_As you can see, all is pretty normal at home. Bella has been seeing the Martinelli son down the street for a month or so now, and your mother is thrilled. Billy and Becca are studying, though Becca’s been staying home more often than not. If you could talk to her about this, we’d appreciate it. We know this is hard on her. Your mother and I are working._

_We miss you. I hope the food is better than it was in my day._

 

_Love,_

_Pa_

 

 

_Bucky,_

_Ma keeps reminding me to tell you that she couldn’t write in Italian. I think Pa already wrote that in his letter, but Ma wants us all to write it. She doesn’t know what order you’ll read these in._

_It’s funny, I forget sometimes. That you’re at war. You never were around much the last few years, anyway. But then Ma will say something or other about you and it’ll remind us all. She still sets your place, you know? On Tuesdays. She sets your place, and one for Steve too, like you’re both still going to show up like you always did before. I think she’s trying to pretend things are normal, but those empty plates just make things worse._

_I’m sure Ma and Pa already told you about Leo. There’s nothing much else to say about that. He’s nice. I think you would like him just fine._

_I have to do the dishes on Tuesdays now. You owe me when you get back._

 

_I love you,_

_Bella_

 

 

_Dear Bucky,_

_Ma wants me to tell you she couldn’t write in Italian. I know you already know that, but she’s watching me write._

_When you moved out last year, I thought the room would seem so empty without you. To be honest, it was really just nice to be able to sleep in the quiet for a while. You were terrible to share a room with. I’m not sure why Steve puts up with it._

_The room feels empty now._

_I don’t know what else to write. Ma says I’m not allowed to sign up for the army because she doesn’t want her sons doing any favors to this country if it can be helped. I don’t think I’d do it even if she said I could._

_I hope you’re doing okay._

 

_See you soon,_

_Billy_

 

 

_Dear Bucky,_

_Ma couldn’t write in Italian._

_I keep stopping by to see Steve. You asked me before you left if I’d check in on him, and I’m starting to get the sense that you asked him to check in on me, too. Every time I stop by, he says he’s been meaning to call. Steve never calls unless you’re here, and you’re not here now, so I get the feeling he’s either lying or you told him to call. And you always said Steve couldn’t tell a lie to save his damn life._

_Don’t tell Ma I swore._

_I’ve been trying to get Steve to come back to Tuesday dinners. Bella keeps bringing Leo, and I’m sick to death of him. Bucky, he’s so boring. All he talks about is his parents’ restaurant and beef orders and the price of potatoes. I miss you and Steve. Remember how you always used to translate between Steve and Ma, but you’d tell the conversation wrong? So that Steve wouldn’t know that Ma hates him? And how you’d sing to the radio while you and Steve did the dishes? The radio’s never on anymore._

_Pa says I should tell you a little about school, but it all seems so boring. I did bad in the spelling bee, good on my last paper. Math’s boring as usual. We talk about the war a lot. They ask us sometimes if anyone’s got any relatives in the war. I say yes, but that you’re still at training._

_Helen says her brother went to training in February and he’s already in Europe. I’m don’t know why you’re still here, but I’m glad._

_You and Steve’s apartment is a real big mess. I don’t know if he knows how to make a bed. Or fold his clothes. He says you and him don’t talk as much as you and me do, but I know that’s not true. I’ve got four letters from you, and last time I was at Steve’s, there was a whole big stack on the dining room table. I think he’d been rereading them. He tried to hide them when he saw me looking. I promise I didn’t read anything other than your signature. You sign ‘em different than you sign your letters to the family._ Yours, Bucky _, instead of_ Love, Bucky _._

_He still doesn’t know. I’ve been keeping an eye on it for you, and because I’m curious. I thought maybe you’d tell him before you left, but I guess not. He’s real sad around the eyes. And he’s still getting into fights pretty often, I think. He has all those same scrapes and bruises you used to have._

_I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about this or if you want to hear about it, but I figure you should probably know, so I’m going to say it either way. I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as you think it is. Henry at school asked out Marie, and they’re going together now. Leo just started bringing Bella a flower a day. I think you should say something._

_Hey you know those stories Ma always tells about Italy? Will you tell me if you get to go to there? Helen says sometimes locations are secret, but if it’s Italy, can you make an exception? I think Ma would like to know if you got to see it. She hasn’t been talking about it as much lately. Maybe if you get over there, if you could manage a picture of something pretty, or a postcard, that would be swell._

_Oh! I almost forgot to tell you, I’ve been drawing a whole lot. I think I’m finally starting to get noses right. I sent you a drawing I did of Bella last week when she was making dinner. She looked so pretty. You know she’s sad around the eyes, too. But she’s been seeming happier the last few weeks. I think she’s probably going to marry Leo. Ma wants her to, and you can see that Bella’s sort of hoping it too._

_Ma is telling me I need to wrap up this letter or else the postage is going to cost too much. I’ll try to save up some change to send my own letter soon. I have so much more to tell you._

 

_I love you, Bucky. I hope you’re doing good._

_Becca_

 

-

 

Bucky’s letters often come in waves.

The post is to blame sometimes--too slow to keep up with Bucky’s incessant writing, his endless stories and constant empty promises of a visit as soon as possible. Other times, there are stretches between the dates written at the top of Bucky’s letters. Days, sometimes even weeks, where Bucky goes quiet; Steve never knows why it is. Maybe because Bucky is doing something classified, maybe because he got shipped out and somehow neglected to tell anyone, maybe because his letters are getting lost in the mail, maybe because he just doesn’t want to talk to Steve anymore.

And then Bucky breaks the silence, usually with a particularly long letter detailing every last thing that has happened since his last one--never the important things, like where’s he’s been or what he’s been doing or whether he knows when he’ll be coming home or when he’ll be leaving for real. No, he sends Steve pages and pages of the minutiae. What was for dinner, who’s been snoring the loudest, the way Bucky keeps waking up with numb arms. Steve reads the letters hungrily, soaking in every bit of information Bucky has given him; he reads them fast the first time, his eyes lines ahead of his brain, greedy for whatever the pages hold. The second time, he reads them slower. He pauses over every sentence.

He does not read them a third time. At least, not that day. He waits, until he’s forgotten some of what it says, so that the third read will be like the first all over again.

This usually takes somewhere between two and five days.

When he does this third read, he writes Bucky back. Sometimes by that point, Bucky will have already sent him another stack of letters. Steve is perpetually behind, responding to things Bucky has long since tucked away to the deeper corners of his memory.

Steve’s letters are short.

 

-

 

_Bucky,_

_You can’t complain about the food there because you were making worse food for us before you left. At least now you don’t have to cook it._

_It’s hot here. You know how August gets in the city. It smells like sewage on our street in the afternoons, and I wish we had a first floor apartment so it would at least get cool at night._

_Miss you._

 

_Steve_

 

-

 

And, tucked into the same envelope, a sketch of their apartment, messier than Bucky had left it. Steve sketches the outline of Bucky’s pile of letters, and doesn’t lie about the sweater draped over the back of the chair: Bucky’s, thin wool sleeves stretched from Steve wearing it on the cold nights, pushing it up to his elbows every few moments.

He draws it all honestly, not sure if he wants Bucky to notice it all.

 

-

 

Bucky gets leave once, during his year and a half of training. He’s been in Wisconsin just over a year (twelve months, four days) when his train pulls into Penn Station.

Billy Barnes is waiting for him there, a thin paperback in his lap. His usually-untidy curls are trained into submission, his shirt unwrinkled and shoes shined. Dressed finely for his sister’s wedding, exactly like Bucky would expect their ma to make him; except, of course, for the tiny part of him that was sure, absolutely positive, that everything would have changed while he was away. He, after all, was not the same. How could anything in Brooklyn have remained of the way he left it?

In the half-second it takes for Billy to look up and notice Bucky, Bucky is stricken by the extra inches Billy’s gained, and the squaring of his jaw; he is stricken by how very much Billy has begun to look like a mirror.

And then Billy is looking up, that big smile stretching his face--the one that’s always looked a little out of place on Billy, who is usually so quiet. It’s the same smile Bucky has, and their ma on the rare occasions when she loosens her mouth from its determined frown.

“Hey,” Bucky says when he walks up to Billy.

“Hey, Bucky,” Billy says. He closes the book and stands to hug Bucky. “We gotta hurry home. I told Ma I’d only be gone an hour and it’s already been two.”

“You tell here where you were going?”

“Said I was checking in with the florist. You said not to tell her.”

“Beautiful. We got a make a stop on the way.”

 

When they get to Steve’s apartment, Bucky arranges his uniform just so and leans against the doorway. Billy is standing a few feet back, hands in his pockets, unimpressed.

Bucky finally knocks on the door--the thin wood one that always let in the cold. It’s the same pattern he’s always used to knock on Steve’s door, since they were in junior high. It’s lazy, loping, and it gives Bucky’s stomach enough time to jump when he hears Steve’s footsteps. His mind is just starting to wander, visions of Steve pulling Bucky down by the lapels to kiss him, overwhelmed with delight at Bucky’s unexpected homecoming.

Of course, when Steve opens the door, he takes only a second to look at Bucky before he’s balling his fist and sending it careening into Bucky’s gut.

When Bucky’s doubled over, Steve’s familiar, angry voice is berating him. “What the _fuck_ , Bucky? How long have you been home? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was a surprise,” Bucky wheezes.

“You wrote ten letters last month! You couldn’t have mentioned this?”

Bucky jerks his head sharply in Billy’s direction. “Barely told my ride, Stevie. Couldn’t let word get out.”

“I could have picked you up,” Steve grumbles.

“Billy keeps a secret better. Anyways, I thought you’d be happy to see me,” Bucky says. He straightens into standing and lets out a laugh, breathy with pain. “Shoulda known better. You’re never happy.”

Steve gives a noise of irritation. “I am happy. I also think you’re an ass.”

“I’ll take it.”

 

The wedding is beautiful.

Ma Barnes cries the whole way through, though no one expected any less of her--first, when her eldest son shows up unannounced, then when Becca puts on her bridesmaid dress, and finally when she sees Bella walking down the aisle. There is a faint sniffling from the front of the chapel, throughout the ceremony.

Once the reception has begun, of course, she is all business. She quickly finds a seat for Bucky and, begrudgingly, one for Steve at the same table. She puts them pointedly on opposite sides.

Bucky takes the chair to Steve’s left instead, scoots it a little closer than is strictly necessary.

They’re seated next to Leo’s sister, a woman about Steve’s age, with brown curled hair and an amused expression. She doesn’t ask about Bucky’s arm pressed against Steve’s, and her eyes don’t linger the way most do. She introduces herself (Angie) and leaves them be, save for the occasional smirked complaint.

The night passes in a rush. Steve’s voice is low and laughing in Bucky’s ear, commentary and companionship that Bucky carefully tucks himself into. Becca snags the seat across from them and is an endless flurry of words until the music picks up.

Bucky sets his hand on the back of Steve’s left arm, slides it down to his elbow. “Let’s dance, Steve,” he says.

Steve barks a laugh. “No.”

“Aw, c’mon, Steve.” He draws out the first _e_ , the way he always does when he’s trying to get his way.

“Why don’t you ask Angie?”

Angie lets out a scoff from her seat. She’s ripping a roll apart, swiping each bite through the butter dish, and stuffing it into her mouth. She scrunches her nose, looking at Bucky. “No thank you.”

Bucky, loose with a glass or two of wine, holds Steve’s elbow tighter and nudges him into standing.

“Do you want to?” he asks, leaning in a bit closer than he should.

Steve rolls his eyes; his cheeks are pink, and Bucky wonders if it’s because the room is crowded, or because this small space the two of them occupy is too: crowded, close--complete.

 

By the time they leave, Bucky has loosened his tie to near-indecency. His curls have freed themselves from his precise styling, and his chest is heaving.

Steve dances for only one song, but Bucky remains through at least a dozen; he takes only short breaks to throw Steve a wink from across the room, the way he used to from the filthy makeshift pitcher’s mound. _You are all I see in this room, and all I could possibly care about._

Bucky offers to walk Steve home, and Bucky’s ma’s tight smile tells him that she already knows he won’t be coming back.

They don’t talk much, while they walk; Bucky has said everything he knows how to say already, and they’ve reached a point of quiet that neither of them knows how to breach. How, after all, is Bucky supposed to tell Steve the ugly way this war makes him feel? The sincerity with which he often thinks of walking away from it, leaving only the smallest of clues for Steve to follow. He’d be a criminal, sure, but they would be alive and his shoulders would be lighter than this, this leaden feeling they carry every day, now.

The apartment is a mess, of course, but Bucky does not let it crawl beneath his skin the way mess usually does. He closes his eyes to it, and heads straight for the window. He wrestles it open, lets the freezing air inside.

To his credit, Steve does not allow himself a single word of complaint. Bucky thanks him, silently.

Bucky slides, his back against the uneven wall, until he’s planted on the floor, legs crossed in front of him, young and familiar. Steve joins him, knees tucked to his chest, and it’s hard, in that moment, to remember that they are in their twenties, now, fighting wars and forcing themselves forward every day; it feels almost as if a dime novel should appear in Bucky’s hand, radio programs staticky in the background, Steve sketching next to him, Sarah Rogers in the kitchen, laughing at Bucky’s too-frequent comments to Steve.

“Do you ever think,” Bucky starts. It takes him a handful of long moments to realize the words are his own, and when he does, he laughs.

Steve joins him. “Contrary to what you might believe, yes, I do occasionally think.”

“No,” Bucky says. “That wasn’t the whole question.”

Steve doesn’t prompt him to finish it--lets Bucky entertain the idea that he doesn’t have to, that he could leave that thread unfinished and loose in the air. But Bucky was never one to stay quiet for too long. He doesn’t let himself consider the completion of the question.

“Do you ever think about the Grand Canyon?”

“What?”

“You know. Out west. The Grand Canyon. Big crack in the ground?”

“I know what the Grand Canyon is, Buck.”

“Okay. So. Do you ever think about it?”

Steve considers. “I guess not. Why?”

“I do.” Bucky waits for a response, but when one doesn’t come, he continues. “I’d like to go someday. You know. Take a train or something.”

Bucky sees Steve nod out of the corner of his eye, and so turns his head to look at the crooked profile, the nose set by Steve’s defiance as well as Bucky’s own youthful pitching skills.

“You want to come with me?” Bucky asks.

“I’d like that.”

 

They fall asleep together that night, and wake up pressed against each other. Bucky lets himself breathe, just this once, before he rolls away.

 

-

 

There’s a photo of them, at the wedding, in their seats. Steve’s mouth twisted up on the right and his eyebrows amused, glancing sidelong at Bucky. Bucky is mid-word, as he is in nearly every picture; one hand rests on Steve’s shoulder.

Bella delivers the picture to the apartment a month later, long after Bucky is gone again.

 

-

 

They see each other in June, for one night. It’s quiet, neither of them willing to broach the topic of Bucky’s leaving the next night, just around two in the morning.

They sleep side-by-side, unconnected and more awake than either of them would ever admit. There are words marching through Steve’s head, insistent on being noticed, but Steve is more stubborn than they are.

In the end, it’s the last night either of them spends in that apartment.

 

-

 

_June 22, 1943, 13:02_

 

_...Despite disruption, procedure on S. Rogers was fully successful; Further samples of serum developed by Dr. Erskine have been lost; replication processes have begun as of 12:00 today. Ten samples of Rogers’s blood as well as extensive notes from Dr. Erskine are under review._

_Rogers is showing no signs of adverse effects. Further reports will be filed with any changes in his condition. Rogers has been taken off of medical watch unless and until he shows any signs of necessary medical attention._

 

_Signed: Agent Margaret Carter_

 

-

 

Peggy Carter is like nothing Steve has ever seen; her square jaw, dark hair, sad eyes--those things are familiar, sure. It’s her voice, really, that gets to Steve: harsh, but full of laughter and bemusement. A lurking kindness underneath all that stubborn confidence. This doesn’t show much; in fact, Steve often thinks he might be imagining it altogether, but he has a feeling it’s not an entirely false impression.

She is, of course, beautiful in a way that knocks the words from Steve’s defiant and usually-loud tongue. She is intimidating, too. More than anyone Steve has ever met.

They don’t speak often; at least, not as often as Steve would like. When they do, the words are small things, dropped in politeness. She is Agent Carter to him for months. He does not even dare to test the two syllables of her first name in his imagination. She will remain staunchly formal, no matter how distracting Steve begins to find her. It’s something he’s never experienced before, simultaneously so much harder and so much easier than things ever were with Bucky.

He is not comfortable around her, at least not yet. He watches his every word but still finds them stumbling out in a yammering mess. But the way he feels is easier, lighter. His helium lungs don’t come with a leaden stomach or bitten nails. Not with Peggy.

She speaks to him the same, when he’s grown taller and broader. She tilts her gaze upward, but the quirk to her mouth and the determined set of her shoulders remain identical.

He catches her once, when they happen to be in the same place for one serendipitous day, with half a dinner roll tucked in her cheek, crumbs dusting her red lips and the maps in front of her. She has an empty plate next to her and a napkin bulging with bread at her elbow. Her nose is scrunched in concentration, her jaw working absently while she fiddles a pencil in her other hand. There is something about her casualness, her hunched shoulders and unguarded face, that makes her seem human in a way she simply hasn’t before now.

Steve hesitates for a moment, then seats himself across from her.

“Agent Carter,” he says, voice softer than he intends for them to be.

She starts, broken out of her concentration. When she rights herself, she takes another bite of her roll and, around it, says, “I think you can call me Peggy now,” she says. She gestures to the star on his chest, the ridiculous outfit he’s mostly covered with a pair of normal pants and a jacket. “I hear you outrank me now.” There’s a wryness to her words that lets Steve know that she’s entirely unimpressed with his get-up. He appreciates it.

Steve laughs, tilts his head in a bit closer to hers conspiratorily. “From what I’ve seen, you’re not much of one for protocol, Peggy.” The name comes out far more naturally than he was expecting it to, as though it’s been waiting there for months.

 

-

 

LETTER RETURNED TO SENDER, November 1, 1943.

 

_Bucky,_

_I know it’s been a while since I wrote. I hope you’re not too mad at me, but I’m sure you are. I might be seeing you sooner than we originally thought, so you can chew me out then. I wouldn’t blame you, I know you get worried. You always tease your ma for how worried she got about you and Becca and Billy (I didn’t really ever see her worrying over Bella, but that’s probably because she’s the only one of you all with a head on her shoulders), but you do just the same thing, Buck. You’ll be mad at me for saying that, too. While we’re at it, I better tell you that I joined up. I wasn’t going to tell you because I knew you’d be mad, but I also knew you’d find out eventually. You can yell about that when you yell at me for not writing and for pointing out that you act just like your ma. Just get ‘em all out of the way at once._

_I don’t know where you are, but Peggy says they can get this letter to you just fine. I hope she’s right. She usually is._

_Anyway, I hope you’re good, Buck. I hope I can see you soon. You’ll laugh when you see me, I think._

 

_Steve_

 

_-_

 

LETTER RETURNED TO SENDER, November 1, 1943.

 

_Bucky,_

_I wrote a letter to Becca a few weeks back and gave her a sketch I’d done of you. Thought she’d like it. I just got a response today. She drew us, I think from a picture from Bella’s wedding. She’s getting really good, Bucky._

_It’s been slow here. Hope you’re good._

 

_Steve_

 

(Enclosed: a pencil drawing, on thin paper, of the three youngest Barnes siblings. Steve Rogers’s signature in the lower right hand corner, along with the date, _September 2, 1943._ The letter is postmarked September 3.)

 

-

 

LETTER RETURNED TO SENDER, November 1, 1943.

 

_Bucky,_

_I know you’re mad at me, but you haven’t written in weeks. Unless your letters are getting lost, but I doubt that’s the case. I’m not too hard to find, anyway, and that’d be a lot of letters to lose._

_You always get on my case for not writing to you, and now you’ve got your head too far up your ass to reply to mine._

 

_Hope you’re okay._

_Steve_

 

_-_

 

LETTER RETURNED TO SENDER, November 1, 1943.

 

_Bucky,_

_If you’re mad at me, I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s it. Becca hasn’t heard from you either. I’m worried._

 

_Write me soon,_

_Steve_

 

_-_

 

Bucky doesn’t remember much about what happened.

He remembers Azzano, somewhat, but only really in the haziest of outlines. Like he skim-read that part of his life, and is only now realizing that none of it had soaked in. He knows, of course, this isn’t the real reason that the details are slippery, but the lie is easier to swallow.

It takes them two nights and one day to get back to camp. Steve sleeps maybe three of those thirty-six hours, and Bucky even fewer. If it weren’t for the moments when he jolts awake, yanked from half-dreams, he wouldn’t be entirely sure he slept at all. And when he looks at Steve--who both is and is not the Steve he knew before--there’s a part of him that’s still waiting for another jolt to bring him into reality.

 

-

 

_November 5, 1943_

_Dear Steve,_

_It’s funny, I thought I was done with these letters. Didn’t think I was going to get the chance to write any more. I also didn’t think we’d be sleeping in the same room again, though, or that you’d have gone and found someone while I was away, so I guess I was wrong on all counts._

_She’s beautiful, but you won’t hear me saying that again. Honest, if anyone asks me, I’ll say I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I do, of course, she’s just your type. I guess, at least. I never really knew what your type was, but she seems just as pig-headed as you are, so I guess she’s your type._

_You know, I kept telling myself that the second we were alone, I’d tell you. I’d tell you everything, and no matter what you felt, you’d be okay with how I feel. I was so ready, I spent every step thinking on it. And then we get here, and there she is._

_I hate the way you look at her. Maybe that’s selfish of me, Steve, but I hate it. I don’t know if you ever looked at me that way, but if you did, I’m so sorry I missed it._

_I wish you would have at least told me. Why didn’t you?_

_You’ll never read this anyway, so what’s the point in talking about something I don’t want to talk about._

_You know what finally did it for me? Convinced me all this was really happening, that I wasn’t in some elaborate dream? Your nose._

_You’re going to laugh, but I looked at you one last time before we got to camp, and there it was, your big shnoz staring back. I don’t know where the big bump came from--you’ve broken it so many times, I can’t remember which was the one that finally set it crooked. Do you? I don’t think it was the baseball I hit you with that one time (sorry again). I think it was later. From a fight, probably. Your mom just sighed when she saw it. I always liked it. I like it more now. It’s familiar. You look different but the same. I can deal with the different because the same is real nice._

_They offered me an honorable discharge when we got back._

_I wish I’d said yes. But you’re here and so I’m here. You owe me a real fuckin’ nice dinner when we get back to Brooklyn, you ass._

 

_Still yours even though you’re an ass,_

_Bucky_

 

_-_

 

As luck would have it, the Commandos’ first assignment is in Italy, surprisingly close to where Bucky’s ma grew up. When the folder is delivered to Steve and he glances at the map, he has to double check with Bucky, but there it is, two miles out of their landing spot.

Steve plans it out so they’ll walk through the town, because he can see that Bucky wants to. Bucky, who hasn’t been talking much to Steve lately. Or anyone, for that matter.

It’s a straightforward mission, which should take them a week at most, but Steve presses the group to get there early, with the promise of a night in town.

They don’t get nearly as much trouble there as Steve was expecting. Out of their uniforms, no one much cares about their American accents; their loudness, of course, is a slightly different story, but it seems amiable enough.

Bucky’s the only one with any passable Italian, so he does the talking, to many howls of laughter from the Commandos.

“Who knew Barnes was such a linguist?” Dum Dum barks, a heavy hand clapping down on Bucky’s shoulder.

Gabe smiles. “You study in high school?”

And Steve hasn’t seen Bucky laugh too much lately, but he does then. Eyes wrinkling at their corners and mouth wide open. “My ma would kick your ass right back to the States if she heard you askin’ me that. No, she’s from around here. I could probably find her family, but last I checked, they were fighting.”

“Still. They’re family, right?”

“We’re real good at holding grudges.”

It gets a good laugh from the dead-tired Commandos, and so Bucky spends the next hour or so spinning stories about his over-packed house back home in Brooklyn, half-filled with the aunts and uncles and cousins who have settled in New York like his ma; later, when they’re crowded around a low campfire, he explains his pa’s side--the second-generation Brooklyn Jewish side. He tells them about the way both halves of the family crowded into their tiny living room every holiday.

Steve’s witnessed it all firsthand, of course, but there’s something different about hearing Bucky describe it. It’s like seeing it, for the first time, the way Bucky does--these people are not strangers looking sidelong at him, but family. Though Steve never got to actually eat much of the food, for fear of allergic reaction, Bucky explains so thoroughly that Steve can nearly taste it.

He takes out a notebook, and sketches Bucky’s expressive hands for the first time since they found each other again.

 

-

 

_December 29, 1943_

_Dear Ma,_

_I’m sorry I couldn’t be home for Christmas this year, but I did finally see Italy, so I figured you’d let me off the hook. I’m also sorry I couldn’t write this in Italian, but you know how it is--have Billy translate--I have so much to tell you._

_You were so right. The food here is so much better. I swear, we were all of us eating pistachios by the bowl. And everything was so beautiful, even in the winter. Nothing like home. There’s not that ugly layer of dirty snow. The pigeons are the same, though! You never told me that. You always complained about them back home. I didn’t realize they’d be here, too._

_I want to bring you back here someday, though, because I know you’d know all the best places to eat. I couldn’t remember the name of that restaurant you used to tell us about, and it wouldn’t have been the same without you anyway._

_I hope you’re well, Ma. Miss you all._

 

_Love,_

_Bucky_

 

(Enclosed: Steve’s sketch of the main avenue of the town, cobblestones and leaning buildings lit from the west.)

 

-

 

The truth is, Italy was melancholy and difficult. Beautiful, all the same. That at least had not been a lie.

But he hadn’t forgotten the name of his ma’s favorite restaurant; it had closed years ago, a bar erected in its place along the uneven road, and he didn’t have half the heart to tell her so. With any luck, it would be years at least before she discovered his lie, if she ever did.

 

-

 

Their next mission is in the mountains, in January, two weeks of gathering intel, and it’s almost impossible. They’re all freezing, and miserable, and Steve has never been more tempted to call it quits at something in his life. It’s obvious that everyone is questioning their decision a bit, following Steve into this terrible idea. When they set up camp, there is no joking around, no jovial conversation as they pitch their tents. It had been chilly in Italy, but nothing like this. There had been no biting wind, no numb fingers and prickling noses.

They make the watch schedule and settle in. Steve’s isn’t for another four hours, so he shimmies down into his sleeping bag and stares at the ceiling of the tent he shares with Bucky.

“Steve?”

It’s quiet, and Steve almost dismisses it as the wind, but when he glances over to Bucky, Bucky is looking back at him. The skin around his eyes is darker than usual, his beard growing in longer than he usually lets it; there hasn’t been much of an option.

“Yeah, Buck?”

Bucky crawls out of his sleeping bag, nudges Steve over, and slips next to Steve. He shifts down until he can rest his forehead on Steve’s chest, his knees bent and toes curling and uncurling against Steve’s own.

Steve can feel Bucky’s laugh in his own chest. “This used to be a hell of a lot easier when you weren’t a giant,” Bucky says.

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

“‘S fine. How the fuck are your toes still cold, though?”

 

-

 

In Steve’s sketchbook, dated January 7, 1944, is a loose sketch of Bucky asleep, done while he’s on watch. Bucky--who trekked out with him and promptly fell back asleep, still wrapped in the sleeping bag, his head on Steve’s thigh--is peaceful, mouth open as always. The sparse hairs on the back of his neck, where his hairline tapers, are quick swipes of Steve’s pencil; his eyes are made of thick and purposeful lines. There is just the faintest suggestion of Steve’s pants underneath, with a spot of drool at the corner of Bucky’s mouth.

Bucky’s hand, resting just above Steve’s knee, is just barely outside the edges of the paper.

 

-

 

When Bucky meets Agent Carter formally for the first time, it goes about as well as he expects it to; which is to say, much worse than Steve wants it to.

Fortunately, Steve is not there to witness it.

It’s been months since the Commandos were in Italy, and the air of Europe is starting to get heavy with spring humidity; Bucky has been carefully and ungracefully picking his way around conversations about Peggy for months; he’s avoided speaking with her, looking at her, thinking about her--anything. To Bucky Barnes, Agent Carter is just an unfortunate footnote on an already-long and always-growing list of things that twist his stomach into knots.

She manages to shoulder her way into his line of sight in May, when they’ve just come back from their latest mission. Steve is inside, giving a report, and Bucky is sprawled on the rickety picnic table, letting the sun darken his already-tanned face. Her shadow falls across him; before he opens his eyes, he makes a mental list of people it could be. She doesn’t make the cut, but there she is.

Carter really is beautiful. Her expression isn’t completely hard, as it almost always looks at first glance, but it certainly isn’t open. Bucky sighs, and closes his eyes again.

“Agent,” he says.

“Sergeant.”

Neither says anything for a moment; Bucky knows she’s there for something in particular, but he also knows that he’s not going to be the one to invite conversation. If this is going to happen, he won’t make it easy; because he doesn’t have to, because he doesn’t want to. Because he knows it would make Steve happy if he and Carter got along, joked around every so often. But Bucky won’t do that, because he’s not particularly interested in making Steve happy right now, and even if he was, he’s not sure he could stomach it.

She clears her throat deliberately. “Sergeant,” she starts again.

“You still here?” he says, opening his eyes lazily to look at her. He can nearly see her temper ignite, but she keeps her voice even. Cold.

“Sergeant Barnes, I’ve been sent to get a statement from you.”

“‘Bout what?”

“Azzano. And the weeks that preceded, prior to Captain Rogers’s mission.”

Bucky bites the inside of his cheek at the mention of Steve. _Captain Rogers_. As though that’s all he is to her.

“Already gave my statement on that. Twice, if I remember right.”

“Yes, but we feel that there’s always a chance that something may have been left out.”

Bucky pushes himself onto his elbows. Voice flat, he says, “You know, I’ve actually got a pretty decent memory, believe it or not.” A breath, and then, harshly, “You can ask _Steve._ ”

She narrows her eyes. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to discuss this with Captain Rogers. There are certain things we don’t always like to tell our superior officers.” She pauses before the last two words, and tilts her head to match the lilt of her voice.

“You know, I wouldn’t really call me and Steve _conventional_ , if you know what I mean.” He doesn’t mean anything, no matter how much he might wish he did. She doesn’t have to know that.

Her face doesn’t change, and Bucky gets the feeling that she’s not particularly impressed with his taunts. “Even so, I’ll be getting a third statement from you, Sergeant Barnes. Tomorrow, seven AM sharp. It’s not a request.”

She turns on her heel and leaves. Bucky rolls his eyes, and lays back down. He doesn’t move again until Steve fetches him hours later for a late dinner.

 

-

 

_May 02, 1944, 07:43._

 

_CARTER: Just a few more questions, Sergeant Barnes. Can you tell me about the night Captain Rogers arrived?_

_BARNES: It wasn’t different than any other night. Until Steve--I mean, Captain Rogers--_

_CARTER: Either name is fine, Sergeant._

_BARNES: Oh. So yeah, it wasn’t much different than any other night there. Already told you, the days all sort of blurred together at a certain point. Not sure how to describe it. But it was the same until Steve showed up._

_CARTER: I understand he looked rather different than the last time you saw him._

_BARNES: (laughter) Sure, just gained a foot and a hundred-somethin’ pounds. Other than that, just the same._

_CARTER: But you followed him anyway?_

_BARNES: What do you mean?_

_CARTER: You followed him when he told you who he was? Even though he looked so different?_

_BARNES: He didn’t have to tell me. I recognized him._

_CARTER: Immediately?_

_BARNES: Yeah. Of course. Why do you need to know this?_

_CARTER: And you trusted him?_

_BARNES: What?_

_CARTER: You trusted Captain Rogers that night? There was no hesitation?_

_BARNES: No. None._

 

_-_

 

When Bucky gets shot, Steve’s limbs go numb and his breath goes thin. It’s like being thirteen years old and dangerously sick all over again, the way his chest is heaving now.

He rushes to Bucky. Morita is already there, kneeling and yanking his bag open with a measured urgency.

The second he sees Bucky’s face contorting in pain but still very much alive, his stomach expanding and shrinking with somewhat pained breaths, Steve straightens and turns, arm already outstretched. He’s not much of a shot, but with a few tries, he’s taken care of the man responsible for the bullet in Bucky.

“Check our perimeter,” Steve barks to the remaining Commandos. They fan out, circling the copse where Bucky lays, groaning into the ground.

It’s not until Steve hears Morita laughing that he feels anything other than panic.

All it takes is a questioning look before Morita is shaking his head with a barely-contained grin on his face. “Sarge here got himself shot in the ass, Cap.” He gestures to the injury. “Wouldn’t expect any less.”

“It’s my _thigh,_ you fucker.” Bucky’s voice is pained but indignant.

“I’m looking right at it, Sarge. That’s your ass right there.”

“ _I think I’d know._ ”

Morita is cutting the leg and seat of Bucky’s pants open messily and shaking a packet of white powder onto the wound before reaching back into his bag. “What do you think, Cap?” he says as he removes the necessary items. “Ass or thigh?”

“I think I’m going to check in with the others,” Steve says.

“I think that’s an evasion, which means ass.”

“He’s going to be fine?”

Morita rolls his eyes. “Yeah, he’ll be fine. The ladies will get a little less of a view, but he’ll be fine.”

“I hate you both,” Bucky says.

 

Days later, when they’re back at base and Bucky is in the medical tent getting his stitches repaired, Agent Carter pays him a visit. He’s pulling his belt tight when she walks in and leans against one of the beds.

“So,” she starts. She looks smug.

“Don’t.”

“How’s the ass, Sergeant Barnes?” she asks, a small bubble of laughter making its way past her lips; it makes Bucky both hate her and like her a bit more.

“Oh, it’s perfect, Agent. And yours?” he asks, all false innocence.

She throws her head back, a sharp laugh escaping, and it’s so much kinder than Bucky wants it to be.

“Perfect as well, thank you for asking,” she says, playful and amused, and Bucky purses his lips tight to stop from smiling as she walks away.

 

-

 

_...at 22:42 on May 18, 1944, Sgt. James Barnes was shot by a solitary HYDRA operative; operative was neutralized by Cap. Steven Rogers approx. one minute later. No other operatives were found nearby._

_Sgt. Barnes sustained one gunshot wound in the upper thigh; field medic James Morita removed the bullet, cleaned the wound, and tied ten stitches before unit found a safe camp spot for the night and returned to base the next day, May 19, 1944 at 19:25._

 

_Signed: Captain Steven Rogers_

 

-

 

For Steve’s twenty-sixth birthday, the Commandos celebrate in their own way. That is to say, they’re mid-mission, and there’s very little they can do. But they start the day telling their favorite Captain Rogers stories: the first time they heard him swear (at Bucky, for beating him at a card game), or the most recent time (at Bucky again, for burping in his face), or the time he wrote a report about Sergeant Barnes getting shot in the ass (a favorite amongst all save Bucky).

“It said _thigh_ ,” Bucky says.

“Okay, Sarge, then why don’t _you_ share something? You’ve got years more material than we do,” Gabe says.

Bucky grins; he’s been waiting for someone to ask him.

“Oh, where do I start?”

And, as the rest of the team sets up camp around him, Bucky Barnes launches into a narration of his childhood growing up with Steve Rogers, starting promptly with, “You see, when he was a kid, Steve here couldn’t do math to save his damn life.”

Steve sighs, and Bucky knows this is a sign that it’s going to be a good story night.

First, “So Steve couldn’t do math for shit. And somehow this idiot _still_ gets a job doing inventory someplace. I ever tell you fellas about the time he thought he’d misplaced a whole box of apples, and we spend all night in the storeroom lookin’ for ‘em? Turns out he just miscounted.”

Then, “You’ve all seen Steve’s art, right? Amazing. Beautiful! A true talent amongst us. He started drawing out of spite because I was bugging him one day. It’s a great story, actually…”

And, at least an hour later, “Steve’s mom was a saint, I’m still fully convinced of it. Wouldn’t believe in saints if it weren’t for that woman. In fact, I don’t believe in saints. But I believe in Sarah Rogers, and that woman was a saint. She used to make this apple pie for Steve’s birthday, every year. Perfect amount of tang, perfect amount of cinnamon. And she’d let me play the radio while I did the dishes for her. If I was really lucky,” Bucky starts.

“She’d sing along with you,” Steve finishes.

Bucky meets his eyes, and Steve looks so much like he used to in that moment, like he’s begun aging younger instead of older, and Bucky is thirteen years old and back in the Rogerses’ kitchen teaching Steve to dance while Sarah Rogers looked on, laughing, hands wrapped tight around her mug of tea. Bucky’s hand on Steve’s and his heart racing and the tart and sweet smell of apples baking in the air.

And today, exactly fourteen years later, their eyes locked and the world fallen mercifully quiet for a beat, Steve smiles at him just the same. His smile is just the same.

 

-

 

_July 4, 1944_

_Dear Steve,_

_You know, all those years of telling you space stories and westerns and Shakespeare, and I never bothered to ask what kind of story is your favorite. I’ve been thinking on this since February or something, I’m not sure. Early. I wanted to write you a story. But I wanted it to be something you’d really like. Not me. So I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I thought that a Steve Rogers tailor-made story would meet the following criteria:_

 

_1) Needs a good hero, but not a boring one._

_2) Takes place on Earth. No aliens._

_3) Can be a love story, but only if it’s not a stupid one. (No_ Romeo and Juliet. _)_

_4) ??_

 

_So you see my conundrum, Steve. It took me a lot of thinking, and I finally thought: I listened to the radio while I was at training, a year or so ago, and there was a particularly good Dodgers game. I’m sure you listened to it, too. But I know you didn’t go, and neither did I, so some of this might not be exactly what happened, but here goes. Your own personal account of that Dodgers game._

 

_I was laying in my bunk in Wisconsin. The radio was turned up, the windows were open, there was a fly buzzing around the lightbulb in the dorms, even though the bulb had been out for weeks. It was Sunday afternoon, our only time off that we got every week, so the whole room was full of loud men. Cigarette smoke and body odor. I shut it all out to listen to that game._

_You were in the chair, I’m sure. Legs tucked up against your chest the way you always do. I’m sure you’d forgotten to eat that day, and your hands were probably covered in graphite. The way the heel of your right hand is always smudged gray when you draw. You’re not so hard to predict, Steve. You were yelling at the bad plays with your nose scrunched up._

_I imagined you like that every time I listened to a game on the radio. Curled up in the chair, just like you always were when I was there._

_I’m getting off track. You have to stop distracting me like this, Steve. Ruining your own damn birthday story, and you’re not even awake when I’m writing this. Okay. The game. As I said, it was a Sunday afternoon..._

 

-

 

“ _Sixty-four?_ ” Dum Dum says. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Yes. April, 1964. I’m not changing my mind,” Falsworth says. “It’s been this long already, who’s to say it won’t go on that much longer?”

Dum Dum rolls his eyes. “All right. And you said Barnes?”

“Yes, obviously.”

“So what’s your bet, Dugan?” Gabe says, leaning forward. “We all chimed in, what do you think?”

“I’m putting myself down for tomorrow. And Barnes. We all know it’ll be Barnes.”

“You said tomorrow last week,” Dernier points out.

“Well I’m movin’ my date.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

Dum Dum holds the pen up. “Who’s doing the bookkeeping here, fellas?”

Morita shrugs; as soon as Dum Dum’s written the last loop on the _w_ , Morita says, “You want to bet on tomorrow, that’s fine by me. You’ll never be right, though.”

“‘Course I will. I have every day covered.”

“When it does finally happen, you’ll still be bettin’ on tomorrow. You’ll always be a day off.”

Dum Dum stares at the paper, thinking. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says. “I’m changing my bet to today.”

Gabe slides the list away from him. “Doesn’t work like that, Dugan.

And then--

“What are you all up to?”

It’s Agent Carter, arms crossed and eyebrow quirked. From the look in her eye, it’s clear that she already knows full well what they’re doing, but the Commandos jump to cover their actions anyway. Gabe quickly folds the list in half, and Dum Dum lets out a booming laugh.

“What? Nothing, ma’am. How are you today?”

Peggy’s smile is small, but she leans forward and points at the list. “Put me down for December, 1945.”

“Excuse me?” Dugan says.

“Twenty dollars on Steve.” She takes the pen, and adds her name to the end of the list with her selected date, then seats herself at the table. “Betting is highly prohibited. Pretend I’m not sanctioning this.”

 

-

 

_Morita: September 1944. Barnes._

_Dernier: January 1946. Barnes._

_Jones: March 1945. Barnes._

_Falsworth: April 1964. Barnes._

_Dugan: Tomorrow. Barnes._

_Carter: December 1945. Steve._

 

-

 

“You used to be the heaviest sleeper I’d ever met,” Steve whispers in the dark, their backs pressed together on watch. “Had to nearly roll you out of bed to get you to stop snoring some nights.” Bucky can feel Steve’s shoulders shaking in silent laughter, and he can imagine the tilt of his head, the broad smile on his face.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a defense mechanism,” Bucky defends. “You try living with all those siblings and cousins for a week and let me know how much sleep you get.”

He’s cleaning his knife, for the hundredth time. It’s not his watch even, but Steve’s. Lately, though, Bucky’s been finding himself staying up for both shifts. It’s getting colder these days, and somewhere in his gut, he still thinks Steve’s going to catch the pneumonia that kills him if he’s outside too long. Never mind that he’s bigger and probably healthier than Bucky now. So when Steve settles in for his shift, Bucky wedges next to him and keeps conversation frequent enough that Steve will have an easy time staying awake. Steve does the same for Bucky, no matter how Bucky insists he shouldn’t.

“What’s that song?” Steve says, when the talk has lulled.

“Hmm?”

“The one you’re humming.”

Bucky hadn’t realized he had been, but he hums the bars again. “ _Don’t you dare ever tell me he will care, I’m certain it’s the final curtain,_ ” he sings. Quiet. Slow. An offer, a question, a desperate question he’s been asking for years.

Steve gives a murmur of assent. “You always liked that one.”

Bucky shrugs, and Steve’s shoulder, completely pressed against his own, moves up and down with Bucky’s movement. “Hey, you want a candy?”

Steve tilts his head back until it bumps against Bucky’s. “Yeah.”

Bucky digs in the deep pockets of his pants--a new pair since Morita sliced his old ones open to dig the bullet out of Bucky’s thigh. He brings a small fistful of wrapped hard candy out, and carefully selects one for Steve, his hand held directly at the end of his nose to see the color in the dark. He chooses the pineapple, free of the dye Steve isn’t allergic to anymore and still hates viscerally. He slides the candy into Steve’s waiting hand; Steve’s palm against his fingers is cold, Steve’s circulation still, somehow, abysmal.

“You need my gloves?”

“I’m okay. Thanks.” There’s a crinkling sound, from the wrapper, and then an appreciative noise when he realizes the flavor. “Pineapple. Thank you.”

“It’s your favorite.”

“Mhmm.”

Bucky gives himself whichever flavor his fingers find first, and while he twists it in his mouth, flipping it with his tongue, then pressing it to the roof of his mouth, he lets his hand fall back next to Steve’s, just barely touching.

“You should get some sleep, Buck.”

“I’ll sleep here.”

“You have a sleeping bag a few feet away.”

“You want me to go?”

Steve pauses. “No.”

Bucky settles his head on Steve’s shoulder. “I’ll sleep here. Let me finish my dessert first, though.”

“Fair enough.”

 

-

 

_November 4, 1944_

_Steve,_

_It’s been a whole damn year since you showed up in that lab like a damn fever dream. It’s been a year, and I have to tell you, this isn’t where I saw us ending up today. Me, pulling your ridiculous uniform off at the end of another long mission, you dead asleep and snoring louder than even my pa used to._

_Why do you always do this to me, Steve? I swear, it’s like you’re tryin’ to kill me. Is that it? If that’s it, just key me in. I’d like to be aware, at least._

_That must be what you’re trying to do. What else could it be? You have to know. You have to know how mean it is to make me do this every time we get back from a long assignment. I know you’re asleep, you’re not making me, but I can’t just leave you there. I never could just leave you, Steve. I was never one for tough love with you. I was never one for being tough on you at all._

_I just want to know what I did to deserve this. I used to lie to my ma, all the time. I told her I had a date with this girl, or that, give her some Italian name I pulled out of my ass so she’d smile wide like she always did when she thought I was doing what she wanted. She’d say she didn’t know who that was, and I’d just make some excuse about her not being from our neighborhood. I wasn’t usually going on dates, Steve, I was at your apartment, laughing with you and your mom. You know one time I actually messed up my collar before I walked in the house? I knew she’d be up waiting, too. I knew she’d see it. I knew she’d yell at me, ask me what I’d been getting up to while I was out. I just sort of wanted to pretend for a minute that you’d messed it up._

_I skipped Mass all those times, but really, I don’t think anyone cares much about that. I didn’t pay attention when I did go anyway, so what difference would it have made?_

_We snuck into a movie without paying that one time, but I think you paid on our way out because you felt so bad. You were biting your nails the whole time we were there. Not because you were worried we’d get caught; I think you were worried that we wouldn’t, and we’d get away with something you didn’t agree with._

_What else? I guess some of the things I’ve thought about you over the years would probably make the list. Not because they were about you in particular--would’ve made the list even if they hadn’t been about you._

_You have to know. You have to know that this isn’t how I was planning to peel your clothes off. This isn’t how I was planning to sleep next to you. This isn’t how I was planning anything, Steve._

_But you, you motherfucking asshole of a man, you had to go and get yourself sized up and soldier-perfect. You had to go and save me and a thousand other men, you had to go and make yourself a hero. I shouldn’t be surprised. If anyone had it in them, it was you. But here we are, and here I am, surprised still. I don’t think I’m ever going to stop being surprised by you, Steve._

_Hell, you could kiss me tomorrow, and I wouldn’t ask questions. You don’t question things like that, and I’m learning that it’s useless to question you in any situation. It’s like you see it as a light-up invitation to do something even stupider than the last stupid thing you did._

_I swear, Steve Rogers, you will be the death of me. If it’s not your terrible planning and horrible impulse control, it’s going to be this damn sweaty uniform. If it’s neither of those, it’ll be something else. You never cease to come up with new ways to drive me to an early grave. I’d be amazed, frankly, if some Nazi killed me. How could they succeed at something you’ve been just barely failing at for years now? They sure as hell can’t be as stubborn for you, so I doubt they’ll manage._

_It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not the point. The point is, you’re laying there snoring, and you smell worse than your disgusting boots, and somehow, Steve, you are still beautiful. I want to know how you do that._

_And I want you to know how hard you make my life, every damn day. And I’d say I want you to take off your own damn uniform from now on, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true._

_I don’t remember what the point of this letter originally was, and I’m not even sure I’m entirely awake while I write it. I’m not entirely sure I’m not imagining the pen in my hand, honestly. I’m dead tired, Steve. You’re not going to read this anyway, but in case you do, I hope you know you were beautiful tonight, and I was extremely pissed at you._

 

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

 

_-_

 

Steve sees him first.

The Commandos are barely dragging themselves into camp. It was a long assignment, but a successful one, so there’s a triumphancy in the air around them; Bucky is singing, his voice loud and insistent, pushing them forward. He’s promised that he won’t stop until he has a coffee in his hand and his ass in a seat. He ran out of songs well over an hour ago, of course, so he’s been making them up.

He’s just pouring the coffee into his cup when Steve sees the group of new soldiers filing into camp. They look incredibly lost, but they’re trying to cover it up. And failing miserably. Steve’s about to point them out to Bucky when Bucky starts a new refrain.

“ _And d’you see this cream_ ,” he sings. “Fuck, it’s so beautiful I can’t even rhyme.” He brings the cup to his lips and looks for a seat.

Steve squints, then.

And takes a step forward.

He never would have been able to see him, before, with his terrible vision, but of late, he can see most everything, and of one thing he is entirely certain: Bucky is not the only Barnes at this camp today.

Steve reaches out and wraps a hand around the back of Bucky’s arm and yanks him into standing.

“Fuck, Steve, come on. Just let me sit.”

“Billy.”

“I’m Bucky.”

“No, _Billy._ ” He points.

And he can see the exact moment Bucky sees his brother, the moment the face registers in his mind and he realizes what it must mean--for Billy, for him, for their family. He smiles, puffs up his chest, makes a comment about reconnecting with a long-lost brother before he jogs towards where Billy is standing; there is a sadness, though, a dread in his eyes.

By the time Steve catches up, Bucky and Billy are already mid-conversation, apparently past the questions of logistics; Steve can fill in the blanks, though. The draft, of course; Ma Barnes wouldn’t allow anything else. And a family left behind, worried but optimistic, what with the war’s finish line starting to feel closer. The same speech given to Billy, about being careful, about not trying any heroics; the same speech they gave Bucky, and Bucky completely disregarded.

“How long since you started training?” Bucky asks.

“A month, probably? Not long. They need us over here fast,” Billy says with a shrug. “Ma was furious. I think she was hoping I’d be in training as long as you were, and I’d get to avoid the war altogether.”

And two years ago, Steve would never have understood this. He would have kept his mouth closed and said nothing. But today, after thinking Bucky dead and worrying about him every day, he thinks it makes more sense, the way Mrs. Barnes thinks. He wouldn’t change what he’s done. But if he could save Bucky from this, he would.

 

-

 

_Becca,_

_You know, your brother’s a lot better at writing these than I am. Bucky was always good with words. Guess that’s why he talks so much, huh? Couldn’t write shit down fast enough._

_I haven’t written to you in too long. We saw Billy the other day. He looked good, but Bucky didn’t know that he was going to be here. I didn’t either. Thought he was still home with you all, but I guess neither of us was too surprised. He’s gotten older while Bucky and I have been gone. Said he’s even got a girl back home, huh? Hope you like her better than Bella’s husband. Bucky says you think he talks too much. I think you’re right, but don’t tell your ma I said that. She hates me enough already._

_How are you? Bucky’s writing a letter to you too, and I can already tell it’s better than mine. He’s more than a page ahead of me. He’ll ask how you are too, but I’m really curious to see how drawing’s going. I don’t care much about school and those things. Did you start taking those classes like you said you were going to? The painting ones? I hope you did. I think you’d love painting. I was never any good at it, couldn’t see the colors right. I’d like to try again now. When I get back, you and me, we’ll paint together._

_It’s been good to hear from you, Becca. Thank you for always sending letters. It means a lot to Bucky, and it’s good to know how you are._

 

_Steve_

 

_-_

 

It hits him, one day, while Peggy is talking. Steve has that feeling in his stomach, the one he gets with Bucky; it’s the way her lips move when she talks, the way her hips sit just the slightest bit to the right when she stands. Steve clears his throat, forces his attention back to the conversation.

“Does that sound good?” Peggy is asking.

“I’m sorry, what?”

She rolls her eyes and explains the mission again--in two weeks, in the alps, an interception that will be tricky but doable.

“Sound alright?”

Steve nods, not quite trusting himself to attempt real words.

Back in his room, the one next to Bucky’s, he throws himself onto his bed and sets his pillow on his face.

He gives himself time to think, for a while. Because he always has to, when it comes to things like this. Because it’s not easy and it’s not straightforward and it’s never quite what Steve expects.

Because he’s gotten used to the way he thinks about Bucky. He’s gotten used to the stomach flips and the fidgeting hands and the dry mouth and short breath. The dreams he can’t quite chase away and the thoughts he can’t filter out. He’s gotten used to catching himself staring a little too long at Bucky’s hands, or his jaw. He’s gotten used to the way he has to force himself to look away when Bucky’s bent over his duffle bag in the mornings, when they get ready.

These things are familiar by now. Surprising, at first, and confusing. But he’s had a decade of days to get used to catching his breath, to learn how he feels.

This, with Peggy, is new, and it’s terrifying all over again. And maybe, if he had the time to get used to it, to grow into it and let it settle in his mind, he thinks, it won’t be anymore. Maybe the fear and hesitation will settle the way it has with Bucky, into this sparkling feeling in his stomach. The difference, then, would be that he could share that feeling with Peggy in a way he’s never felt allowed to with Bucky.

 

-

 

_February 18, 1945_

_Dear Steve,_

_I wish you’d just tell me. I’m dying, Steve, and I need to know because I think even knowing would be better than this wondering. I know you’re in love with her, or you could be, or you will be. I don’t know where you are in the process because you step around her name when you talk to me, like you know. You probably do know. I haven’t been too shy about not liking her. I’m sorry about that. I know I should lie, but I never could lie to you._

_But you don’t talk about her, so for all I know, you two could be fucking and I wouldn’t know a thing. I don’t think you are, because I know you and I know that wouldn’t be a small thing for you. But I can convince myself of anything if I have long enough to think on it, I swear. I go back and forth. Between thinking it’s already happened, that it’s about to, that it probably won’t for another few years. I don’t know what difference it makes, but it feels like it does, somehow. Like if it’s a few years, I might have that time with you still._

_With you is a funny way to say it, I guess. Because with you was always complicated. It has been since we were young. Because you’re my best friend, Steve, and you have been since I really knew what that meant. But you drive me crazy, too. With you is great, but with you never means_ with you _, and it kills me. It sounds stupid. Everything I want to say about it just sounds like all the love stories you used to laugh about. You know those ones I used to make up? They were all about you. That feeling of a flame under your fingertips, that desperate need to be touching someone? I pretended to have gotten all those things from a radio program, or a book, or a movie, but they were all about you. Everything was always you._

_And it wasn’t just wanting to hear that gasping sound you make in your sleep sometimes. But it was partially that. Do you know how pretty you are, Steve? You remember that time you told me that beautiful people made you want to draw? I never understood that. Partly because you were always drawing me, but never wanting to be with me. And partly because I write about you all the time and it’s never enough. Because I’m greedy, and you are beautiful, and I’ve been stuck on you for years._

_You know, I never thought you’d really keep the outfit. I was joking, Steve. Do you have to be such a goddamn ass all the time? Fuck._

_Just tell me, Steve. So I can know, at least. It won’t change anything._

_So maybe don’t tell me. So I can have this moment, right now, where we’re still possible._

 

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

 

_-_

 

Someone makes the mistake of handing the Commandos a video camera sometime in late February of 1945, while they wait for their interception mission to come around. It’s a crappy thing; they clearly aren’t trusted with anything nicer. The documentarian--the one who has already been gathering the war promos for months, interviewing the Commandos with little success, and chronicling the home front perceptions of the unit--asks them to tape whatever they see fit. She wants to see what their lives are really like, she says, not what the promos and the comics and the newspapers say. Bucky laughs when she says that, makes some comment about everything being a lot smellier than anyone likes to admit.

But nonetheless, they are left with the camera--a silver-and-black contraption, a cumbersome rectangle that they carry around for a few days while they’re between missions. They take an hour debating who’s the best candidate for carrying the thing, and in the end, it’s Morita who’s saddled with the extra load.

“Medic’s hands,” Falsworth says. “You’ll keep it steady.”

Morita groans, but allows it.

They’re really not doing much that day, so they first give a tour of the army base. They know most of it will be cut for secrecy’s sake, but they have fun doing it. Dum Dum and Gabe narrate, for the most part; Dum Dum points out landmarks, while Gabe introduces people to the camera. Morita makes comments from behind the camera, occasionally turning it on himself to call the other men any of an array of expletives.

“Listen to this fucker,” he says when Gabe gets someone’s name wrong. “Pretending like he knows his ass from a hole in the ground!”

And then Gabe laughing and threatening retaliation; the camera goes shaky as Morita runs. In the background, Steve and Bucky can be seen leaning on each other while they laugh.

Later in the tape, there’s a smattering of interviews, conducted with each member. Dum Dum asks the questions, even for his own interview. The tape is a hodge podge of moments amongst the men; very few will make the cut into the documentary.

 

First is a group shot, the Commandos playing cards around a mess hall table. Steve is drowsing next to Bucky, arms slumped on the table and face buried against the wood grain. There is a pile of hard candies in the middle of the table, and each of the Commandos looks at his cards with a faux-serious expression. Bucky takes two candies gingerly from his stock, which he has balanced on top of Steve’s head, and tosses them into the middle. “I raise you two butterscotch,” he says, and pops a third candy into his mouth.

“You can’t eat the betting pool, Sergeant,” Dernier says.

“Who the fuck’s going to stop me, huh?”

Steve gives a sharp snore, disrupts Bucky’s remaining candy, and then falls back to sleep for a moment before he’s woken again by the shouts of laughter.

 

The camera swoops in over Steve’s shoulder, and focuses on the small sketchbook he has balanced on his lap. He’s filling in shading on a sketch of Bucky. Bucky is clearly mid-word, leaning forward as though driving a point home. Anyone who has seen Bucky around a campfire would know exactly what he’s doing in this sketch.

“The missus is looking real good there, Cap,” Morita says.

Steve jumps, slamming his sketchbook closed and turning around just barely too fast. He lets out a sharp _fuck_ as his shoulder knocks into the camera, which tumbles to the ground. As its lense films their shoes, Morita says, “You got his big block head just right. You always manage to impress.”

 

A few minutes later, Bucky reacts even less gracefully (with a middle finger tossed over a shoulder as he walks away) to being caught writing in his notebook.

 

A shot of Steve and Bucky sitting at a table, shoulders touching, Dum Dum’s loud voice interrupting their conversation, “The world wants to know about Captain America and his faithful kid sidekick--”

“Fuck you,” Bucky interjects.

“--Bucky Barnes. What can you tell us?”

Bucky turns back to the book he’s reading, a dime novel that looks well-loved and worn. “He farted in his sleep once.”

Steve puts down his pencil. “You should hear Bucky fart in his sleep sometime.”

From off camera, Gabe says, “Oh, I have!”

 

A brief clip of Bucky cleaning his gun carefully, singing under his breath. His voice is low, and smooth. Surprisingly practiced. There’s no commentary on this one; he smiles softly, and the shot ends.

 

Each of the Commandos briefly describes their hometown to the camera, trying to one-up each other: Marseille, France; Macon, Georgia; Birmingham, England; Fresno, California; Boston, Massachusetts; and, finally, two Brooklyns.

Steve stubbornly defends Brooklyn until the others give in and Steve gives a whoop of victory. He slings an arm around Bucky’s shoulders, and Bucky says to the camera, “Well _Captain America_ is from Brooklyn, so nowhere else really stood a chance now, did it?” There’s a joking glint in his eye.

 

Steve, smiling at Bucky while Bucky narrates a story about a particularly good game of baseball in the street, when they were younger. He watches closely while Bucky’s talks about things Steve’s heard a hundred times, most likely, and was there to witness himself. And still, he hangs onto the words as though they could save his life, could bring him back from the dead.

Moments later, when Steve has torn his gaze away to get back to re-lacing his boots, Bucky turns and looks at Steve the same way.

 

Peggy Carter, at a table with Steve, heads bent over a map. Peggy’s shoes are off underneath the table, her ankles crossed. Steve laughs at something she says, but the camera is too far away to catch what it was.

 

Bucky, dancing along to the radio, his movements messy. He is smiling, laughing, shaking his hips and arms in ways that don’t match the music but do align with the beat. He has his eyes closed, and the Commandos are whistling in the background. He throws up a quick middle finger before returning to the dancing; his fingers snap to the beat.

Steve, who has been quiet until now, turns to the camera and says, “Believe it or not, he actually can dance pretty well when he wants to.”

“Damn right I can,” Bucky agrees. He takes Steve’s hand without warning, yanks him to his feet. Steve stumbles a bit, and Bucky pulls him in by the waist. “Dance with me, Stevie.”

Steve struggles to get into the rhythm, he shoulders shaking in amusement, his forehead resting on Bucky’s shoulder as he watches their feet carefully. His face is tinged a deep pink, and he laces his fingers through Bucky’s.

“Oh, come on, Steve, I taught you better than this!” Bucky says, but his words are airy and happy.

Gabe leans forward in his seat, at the edge of the frame. “Sarge taught you to dance, Cap? When?”

“I taught him for _years._ He was a disaster. How are you supposed to go out dancing like that? Couldn’t even keep a beat!” Bucky says.

“Still can’t,” Steve admits.

“Still can’t!” Bucky agrees. “You’re still a disaster. Come on, Steve, you just have to follow my lead.”

Instead, Steve steps on Bucky’s bare foot, and they stumble into each other and to the ground, a tangle of limbs and laughter and light. The shot lingers on them, shoving at each other, young and easy.

 

-

 

_DUGAN (off camera): When did you two meet?_

_BARNES: 1928. Steve was face down, ass up in the dirt, in the middle of a fight._

_DUGAN: Ah, tell the audiences about Cap’s colorful past, why don’t you?_

_BARNES: Steve was always getting into fights when we were younger. He couldn’t help it. Someone blinked wrong, and Steve’s fists were already swingin’, isn’t that right, Steve?_

_ROGERS: I wouldn’t say that._

_BARNES: No?_

_ROGERS: I never fought with anyone who didn’t deserve it._

_BARNES: I didn’t say you did! I said that you didn’t have a whole lot of discretion._

_ROGERS: I guess that’s fair._

_BARNES: You still don’t._

_ROGERS: Also fair._

_DUGAN: So, Sarge, you entered the fight when you saw Steve ass-up, needing a hand?_

_BARNES: Yeah. And then I brought him to dinner at my place because my ma was making lasagna and his was workin’ a double. She did that a lot. She was a nurse, you know? Sarah Rogers. A saint, and beautiful too! It’s no mystery where Steve got his looks from._

_ROGERS: My looks?_

_BARNES: Always said you should be in the pictures._

_ROGERS: You said that about my mom._

_BARNES: Well you had to get that face from someone, didn’t you? I brought him back to my house, and my ma hated him right away._

_JONES (off camera): She hated Cap? Why?_

_BARNES: He’s not Italian._

_JONES: Not allowed, huh?_

_BARNES: My ma fell in love with an American Jewish man, and I don’t think she ever forgave herself. She wants nothing to do with any more Americans._

_DUGAN: So how does she feel about Steve being Captain America?_

_ROGERS: She can’t hate me any more than she already did._

_DUGAN: And how about you two? How does she feel about your impending nuptials?_

_ROGERS: (laughing) Jesus._

_BARNES: (laughing) We’re friends!_

 

-

 

On March 2, 1945, Bucky Barnes slips from Steve’s grasp. He is presumed dead.

Two days later, Steve crashes a plane into the water. He is officially declared missing within twenty-four hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_March 1, 1945_

_Dear Steve,_

_I can’t sleep. It’s not even my watch. What a goddamn waste. I could take over and Dernier could be sleeping, but you’re next to me, and I’m selfish, so I’m going to stay here._

_I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, Steve. I don’t know. Call it crazy, but the last few days have just been too good, and I think something’s gotta give. It’s gotta get messy again, because since when have we been allowed to be happy? It’s only ever for moments, Steve. We only ever get moments, you and I, and I feel like this one’s about to end. I don’t know. Maybe I really am crazy. If I am, and you find this letter someday, you can laugh at me if you want, but I think it’s high time I said some things. I’m not saying them for you. I’m saying them for me. You don’t gotta read ‘em, Steve, but if something happens to me, I sure hope you do._

_I think I started loving you early. I can’t remember what the day was, so I think it must have been that first day. I don’t remember much from before you. I remember being the loudest sibling, because Becca hadn’t been born yet. And I remember hating my ma’s cooking lessons. Past that? There’s not much._

_You know, I always wanted to tell you everything. It’s always feels like there isn’t enough time in the day. Like I could keep talking to you forever, if time would just pause for a little while to let me. I think that might be why I don’t remember things before you. Well, I guess that’s wrong. I do remember things before you, but for some reason, those memories are still covered in you. My tenth birthday, my ma made this big dinner, and I got the stomach flu the morning before. Couldn’t eat a thing, could barely get off the toilet for longer than ten minutes, and my ma still refused to cancel the party. I didn’t even know you yet, but for some reason, when I remember that day, you’re there. You’re holding a glass of cold water and trying not to laugh at me. You’re holding my favorite book from that year--_ The Odyssey, _which I don’t think I ever understood and haven’t read in years, never even told you about--and you don’t leave when everyone else does._

_That’s how everything is. I hope you understand that. You are everywhere, in everything, and I just can’t get away from it, Steve. I don’t think I want to, either. I used to think I did, but I’ve almost filled a whole notebook with these letters and I swear I could keep going and never complain._

_Did I ever tell you about the time I told my ma I was going to marry you? You can imagine how well that went. I was eleven. We’d just met, and it was almost her anniversary with my pa. I’d asked him why they’d gotten married, and he said because time never felt long enough when he was with her._

_So I figured you and me would get married, because I knew what he meant._

_That’s probably why my ma hates you so much. I’m sorry about that. If I’d just had the good sense to fall for a nice Italian girl, you might’ve been my ma’s favorite person!_

_You wouldn’t have. And I never could have done that anyway. Don’t think it’s in me, Steve. I don’t know who I’d love if it wasn’t you; I think it would be no one. But I’ll tell you one thing for certain, if I did love someone else, he certainly wouldn’t be a nice Italian girl. It doesn’t matter though, does it? Because I met you, and I fell in love with you, before I ever knew how hopeless it was going to be._

_And so here I am, twenty-eight damn years old next week, and I’m still in love with you. I don’t even feel stuck anymore. I could have walked away, Steve. I could have walked away a year and a half ago after Austria, when they gave me the chance, but here I am. Sixteen months and twenty missions later, ready to follow you again._

_I don’t know what to tell you, Steve. It feels like there’s nothing and everything that I need to say. You know it all already. I don’t think you’re so separate from this; I’ve always told myself you were, that you had no idea, because that was easier, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t know what you think about me, or how, but I know I’m not completely on my own here._

_I don’t know if that makes this better or worse._

_All I know is that I’m in love with you, and I’d die for you tomorrow if I had to. I’d die for you tomorrow, or I’d walk away from all of this with you. We could still do that, Steve. We could walk away._

_We won’t, but we could._

 

_Yours, always,_

_Bucky_

 

 

_-_

 

 

_November 4, 1943_

_Buck,_

_You’re always telling me to date my letters and I never listen because it always seemed a little pointless to me. But I guess I didn’t know how to start this one, so I wrote it to make the page look a little less empty. It’s like when I start a new sketchbook. The first drawing is always the worst because I’m so nervous._

_I don’t know how to say any of this. You’d know better than me._

_I guess it’s like this. I’m giving this letter to Peggy to keep safe, in a file for my next of kin, in case something happens to me. I put you down when I enlisted, hope that’s okay. Guess I should have asked first._

_Don’t you read this if I’m still alive, okay? Unless you want to, but I don’t think you do._

_See, here’s how I see it. When we were younger, and you’d read_ Romeo and Juliet _or Jane Austen or any of that stuff to me, I’d stare at my ceiling nearly all night, thinking about you. And when you kissed those girls, probably not as many as you pretended but still enough, I felt sick to my stomach. And when you taught me to dance, I wanted to freeze time. If I could write like you, I’d tell you exactly what that moment felt like, but I don’t know how. It felt like you._

_And I don’t know, Bucky. I don’t know. I didn’t go into Austria to save all those men. They were coincidences, and I would have left them all if it had meant saving you. I know that’s stupid, I know that’s wrong. I know. But it’s true, Bucky. I would have left it all behind if it meant saving you, I would have run away without looking back as long as I could get you out safe._

_And I could say that I don’t know what that means, but I do._

 

_Love,_

_Steve_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_-_

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Rogers’s sketchbooks, letters, and other belongings are left to Peggy Carter, when the war ends and the search for Steve stops along with it.

Bucky Barnes’s notebooks are mailed in a box to Becca Barnes, a week after they receive the telegram.

Both boxes gather dust in closets for decades.


	3. Interlude.

_ Interlude. _

(There should be stars for great wars like ours.)

 

Bucky has done this all before.

Like the last time, the line between reality and nightmare is unclear. Some days he wakes up to find empty space along his whole left side; others, when he can’t quite get his head clear, he convinces himself he is still in Austria and his arm has only gone numb. Or that it’ll come back soon, somehow.

He is no stranger to this half-sleep, or the cycle of numbness to pain and back. And he is no stranger to the hope that keeps bubbling up under his skin.

Steve came last time. It took him weeks (or possibly years, Bucky’s still not completely convinced), but he came. And he will come this time. One of these days, when Bucky opens his eyes, Steve will be standing above him, blood on his hands and promises on his lips.

 

-

 

They lose Bucky first, and Steve next before they have time to grieve.

It’s in a bar, when the war ends and the whole city is alight with celebration, that they give the toasts. It had been Bucky, always, before. Who would say a few words, usually profane and always perfect, before they took the first drink. There’s a moment of quiet while they decide who will take up the mantle now.

Gabe steps in.

“To Rogers and Barnes.”

“To Cap,” Dum Dum adds, “and his Missus.”

Morita finishes, “The best damn men in this whole fuckin’ war.”

 

-

 

A few years later, Peggy unpacks boxes with Angie Martinelli in their new apartment in Brooklyn. Angie calls from the next room, “Who is this?”

She’s holding the picture of Steve, days before the serum, the way he looked when Peggy first met him. “That’s Steve,” she says. “Before.”

Angie is pointing at the picture enthusiastically, “No! I know him!”

“What?”

“Yeah, I met him at my brother’s wedding! His friend’s sister married my brother.”

“His friend?”

“Well,” Angie says, “ _friend_ might not be the right word. You know, I knew James knew Captain America, but I never thought _that_ kid would be him. Wow. I can’t believe Captain America was dating my brother-in-law!”

Peggy smiles in spite of herself. Barnes, she figures, would like to be remembered that way.

 

-

 

Bucky’s letters and notebooks stay in boxes for years before Becca opens them.

She’s been fighting, again, with their ma, and she thinks she can prove something, if she opens these. If their ma could just see, and understand who her son was. So she carefully peels open the cover of the notebook.

It’s the _yours_ written at the end that makes her close the cover again. Place the notebook back in the box, reseal the flaps. She tucks the box back in a corner of the apartment she will live in the rest of her life.

She spends the day at Bucky’s grave--the small one, not the memorial--and she tells him everything, the way she always has.

 

-

 

He dreams.

Decades pass, and he dreams.

Of his mom, of the war, of Peggy, of Barnes family dinner, of all things.

And Bucky. Bucky, always.

The time passes the way it does when you’re asleep. Sprinting through quicksand, yanked out at the last second. But this time, there is no last second savior, no mercy from the finale of these dreams. He isn’t torn away before Bucky falls from the train, or, in better moments, before Bucky’s hand settles on the side of Steve’s face.

He has every last excruciating moment, played out until the end.

And when he wakes up, lost and confused and alone, he’s not sure whether this is worse.


	4. Part Three.

_Part Three._

(There ought to be awards and plenty of champagne for the survivors.)

_September 18, 2016_

_I think the apartment was small. I remember one bed and a bathtub. I remember the bathroom floor tile. Why? I remember Steve’s ankle, too, I think in my hand, and I remember that being the only thing I could remember at the time, too. Must have been drunk. I think I used to do that, before._

_I remember the window open. Rickety fire escape._

_Was the fire escape at our apartment? It might have been somewhere else. Both, maybe? The one I’m remembering was big enough for Steve and me both. We did homework out there. Steve’s got caught in the wind one time. Blew across the street. I offered to get it, but he said he wasn’t planning on doing anything other than drawing in the margins anyway. I gave him a page from my notebook so he could sketch._

_Oh. Fire escape at his mom’s. That’s where we were._

_Our apartment didn’t have room for sitting outside. I think the window really was open, though._

_Don’t know if there was a kitchen._

_Steve sat in the chair. His shirts were too big. Everything was too big. Except the apartment. That was probably too small._

_Our new apartment is bigger. The windows don’t rattle and the water is clearer. Real bedrooms. There’s no bathtub in the kitchen._

_Steve says this one’s nicer. I didn’t mind the old one, but I think that might have just been because of Steve. I don’t mind this one either._

 

-

 

It’s all a lot easier than either of them really ever expected it to be.

When the dust is finally settled, when Bucky’s skin has begun to feel like his own again, it all seems like a given. That their lives will collide again, that once they’ve come together, they won’t be separated.

And so they find an apartment in Brooklyn.

It takes them all of ten minutes; their old neighborhood is a lot nicer than it used to be, but it has the same smell in the air, the same constant noise. Their new apartment is four times as big as where they last lived together, at least, and the windows are tall. The brick on the walls is intentional, beautiful, clean--not exposed beneath plaster that has been worn through. There’s an ice dispenser on the fridge and a working dishwasher. It’s almost an embarrassment of riches.

There are two bedrooms.

Standing in their bare living room, boxes in their arms. Steve says, “Which room do you want?”

Bucky shrugs, just the left shoulder. His right is occupied, holding a box tight against his side. “Either is fine.” He’ll hate either of them equally, he’s sure; sleeping without Steve next to him has never quite felt right, and the years apart haven’t changed that.

“I don’t have a preference.”

They let the silence play out. Ten seconds, then twenty, before Steve sets his box down. It makes the clanking of cheap ceramic plates, packed slightly too loosely. Bucky gives it a concerned glance.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Steve says.

“Whatever you say.”

Bucky unloads his arm, too, and heaves himself onto the kitchen counter. He crosses his legs at the ankles and watches Steve.

He’s looking a little lost, though Bucky can’t quite figure out why. The apartment is nice. This is nice. It’s all almost sickeningly so--the mantel over the fireplace, the abundance of outlets, the shining kitchen counters. There’s even a washer and dryer system, tucked neatly into a closet next to the bathroom.

“You can have the room with the big windows,” Bucky says. “You get up earlier than I do.”

Steve leans on the counter next to him; Bucky leans forward, elbow on one knee, so he can see Steve’s face. He pulls the first real expression Bucky’s seen since they walked into the apartment and took their brief tour.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Steve asks. “All this?”

Bucky nods. “Yeah. Almost expect the paint to start peeling.”

“And the floor to fall away?”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Steve laughs. Harsh at first, and then with real amusement. He shakes his head, and Bucky can see the way his eyes wrinkle at the corners, the way they have since they were young. “You know,” Steve says, “I just wanted a heater that worked.”

“And a bathtub in the right room?”

“And a bathtub in the right room,” Steve agrees. “Fuck. This place is _huge,_ Buck. What are we supposed to do with all this space?”

Bucky nudges Steve’s shoulder with his own. “Maybe buy a dining room table. I always liked your mom’s.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Circular. I could see you no matter where I sat. It was nice.”

Steve’s face softens. “A circular table, then.”

“Hand me that box I set down?”

Steve does so, bending at the knees. It’s not weird anymore, him lifting this heavy box with ease; Bucky wonders when that happened. When he stopped being nervous that Steve was going to hurt himself doing the little things. He guesses it was sometime around when he started getting nervous that Steve was going to hurt himself doing the big things; he’s told Steve, multiple times now, that if the next fall from a building, window, or helicopter doesn’t kill him, Bucky will finish the job.

But this is a small thing. This is a heavy box, big enough not to be dwarfed by Steve’s now-long arms. He sets it on the counter next to Bucky.

Bucky braces it against his side and rips the tape open along the top.

It takes him only a few moments of digging to find what he’s looking for. He produces a stack of blue post-it notes, as well as a ballpoint pen. He clicks the top pointedly, looking at Steve while he does so, and writes along the top: _To Buy._ His handwriting is shaky— _left handed with no left hand,_ he thinks to himself.

“Circular table,” Bucky says. “Got anything else to add to the list?”

“Pots and pans.”

“You don’t have pots and pans?”

“No.”

“And you’ve had your own apartment for _how_ long?”

Steve taps the list. “Pots and pans.”

Bucky pulls his legs onto the counter and crosses them underneath himself. He scoots back to make room for Steve, who sets his elbows just in front of Bucky’s knees, hands on his own forearms. They each lean forward until they’re huddled over the post-it note list, and they study it.

“We need towels,” Bucky says.

“I have towels.”

“You have two towels. What are we supposed to do on laundry day?”

Steve smiles, and looks up at Bucky.

“What?” Bucky asks.

“Nothing. Laundry day. It’s nice.” He taps the list again, the same as before--once, twice, then a third and softest time. “Let’s get towels.”

 

-

 

Becca Barnes is eighty-seven years old and still as loud as ever.

Steve brings Bucky to see her a week or so after they move in together. They call ahead, but when the door is opened and they see each other, Steve stands to the side for a few minutes. Nothing he can think to say is important enough to interrupt their incessant chatter, or the tears neither of them will admit to shedding.

They migrate, eventually, to the living room. It’s cluttered and warm, connected to the kitchen. There’s a woman puttering around at the sink, draining what smells like pasta. While Bucky and his youngest sister talk in the living room, Steve slips into the kitchen to say hello.

“Hi, Josie,” he greets.

“You want anything to eat?” she offers, her way of greeting. “You know I always make too much.”

“I’m good, thank you.”

She points a wrinkled, freckled finger into the living room. “I want to meet that beau of yours, but I don’t want to interrupt.”

“We’re, uh. We’re not dating.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not what Becca tells me.” Her voice is sing-song and teasing. She begins dicing tomatoes, directly on the counter.

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Josie.”

She brandishes the knife at him. “I’m too old for this, Steven. You get your ducks in a row and then we’ll talk.”

Steve laughs. “Whatever you say.”

“Damn right, whatever I say.” She rinses her hands, wipes them on her dress. “Let’s go meet my brother-in-law, hmm?”

 

-

 

They’ve been married three years, now, and Steve was at their wedding. He remembers thinking how much Bucky would have loved to have been there. How much absolutely overjoyed he would have been to see his baby sister so happy, for so long, with someone so kind.

He can see it now, when Bucky hugs Josie and congratulates them both a few years late, that he was entirely right.

Over and over while they look through the albums, Bucky laments, “I can’t believe I missed the wedding.”

“Steve was there,” Becca assures him. She points Steve out in one of the pictures--dancing with Becca, smiling wide. Then, in the next one, sitting at a table very like the one he’d sat at with Bucky when the first Barnes sister had been married. He’s drawing, in pen, on what looks to be a napkin. Shoulders hunched and eyebrows drawn.

“I hope you saved that drawing,” Bucky says.

“I’m sure I did.”

He finds it later, digs it out of a box he hasn’t opened in over two years, and hands it to Bucky.

It’s the first thing that they hang on their new walls.

 

-

 

It’s only the second time Bucky’s been left alone with Natasha. The first time, they’d spent in complete silence. Bucky left his eyes hard and mouth flat until he heard Steve coming back into the room.

Natasha isn’t an easy person to intimidate, Bucky learns. He should have known as much--Steve’s always been difficult. It makes sense that both of his new friends would be unflappable.

This time, they’re at a restaurant, their plates long since clear. Bucky has remained silent for nearly the whole meal, electing instead to flip his butter knife between his fingers while he watches Steve and Natasha talk. He’s inched his chair closer to Steve every few minutes for the past hour, so their legs are nearly pressed together by the time Steve excuses himself to use the restroom.

Natasha leans forward the second they hear the door latch.

“Listen,” she says. Her voice is flat, but there’s amusement in her eyes. “Adonis is not my type. You can have him. Now stop trying to glare me to death. It’s not going to work.”

Bucky eyes her for a second. He chooses to ignore her frank address of this this thing everyone has, until now, been kind enough to turn a blind eye to. Instead, he asks, “What is your type?”

“Are you trying to flirt with me?”

He cracks a grin, tosses her own words back to her. “You’re not my type.”

She nods. “My type is a nice bottle of vodka.”

He laughs at that, and it’s the first time he makes Natasha smile. He likes it. As if he’s being let into a very small club.

 

-

 

In the years of limbo, Steve adjusted. He adjusted to the nightmares, to the culture shock, and he adjusted to the good things, too--the always-warm showers, the mechanical pencils and spiral-bound sketchbooks.

He grows into and around this life. It’s a bit crooked, but it all works. It fits together, somehow. Running with Sam in the mornings, coffee with Natasha after.

Then, months later, Bucky settling into every crack of Steve’s life; he doesn’t even need to carve the space. They slot together.

There are nights, though, when Steve wakes up sweating from a nightmare, drowning in his sheets and too-big mattress, the spot to his right cold and empty. And those nights, he lays on his back, studying the paint patterns of his uncracked ceiling until he has them memorized. He gets up too early.

Bucky’s door is always opened the smallest crack; through it, Steve can see him asleep on the mattress, snoring and sprawled. The sheets are twisted around him. He’s been moving. He never used to do that.

Steve sincerely considers opening the door, walking in. Shucking his running shoes and laying down.

He grabs his phone and keys instead.

 

Bucky doesn’t wake up until nearly noon that day, and his eyes are bleary when he does.

“Sleep okay?”

There’s only a grunt in response, as effective as an emphatic _no_ , followed by the sound of coffee being poured into a mug. He walks back around the corner and gestures the coffee towards Steve, a silent and begrudging _good morning_.

The shower turns on. Sixteen minutes later, the bathroom door opens and the sound of Bucky’s humming spills out with the steam. Steve is just barely catching on to the melody, piecing together what song it is, when the door to Bucky’s bedroom slams open again and Bucky stalks into the living room.

His newly-short hair is sticking up, towel-dried. The towel itself is tied hastily around his hips. He is drinking from his coffee mug--the one Sam gave them, Steve realizes, with the red Falcon chevron. Steve’s throat constricts, just the slightest bit, when when he realizes how very familiar he looks. There are slight differences, sure--heavier eyes, hair not slicked so close to his scalp, rarer smiles. But his voice is the same, and he still carries himself comfortably when Steve is with him. The ease to his shoulders is still there, still apparent every time Steve finds his hand sketching out the familiarity of Bucky’s outline.

“We need curtains,” Bucky says. He flops onto their too-soft couch nearly hip-to-hip with Steve. Steve, bringing himself back to the moment, has to tighten his grip on the arm of the couch so he doesn’t go toppling into Bucky’s barely-covered lap.

“Why?”

“Because the neighbors just got quite the show,” Bucky says. His voice lilts with the humor of the situation, and he sets his arm on the back of the couch. “Much as it’s a damn good show, I think they have kids, so curtains are in order.”

The curtains they buy are plain--light blue and barely opaque. The process of hanging them up somehow takes them longer than the trek to Brooklyn IKEA did. After they step back to admire their handiwork, Steve yawns, and excuses himself to bed.

 

He’s not sure what time it is when his bed frame creaks.

Steve is a light sleeper, and the movement wakes him immediately. He twists around to look over his shoulder. To see Bucky peeling back the covers and settling in behind Steve.

Half asleep still, Steve smiles. “Curtains not working for you?”

“Terrible. Couldn’t sleep.” Bucky returns his smile. His hand hovers in the air, and, “This okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. He can feel his eyelids drooping, and he settles back against Bucky’s chest. He’s not entirely sure whether Bucky’s arm settling around his waist is a cruel trick played by his sleep-dazed brain, but if it is, he lets himself believe it.

 

-

 

Nights are loud.

It’s something that comes with the no-stars sky of the cityscape. It’s something that comes with this nearly sound-proofed apartment and the sudden sirens and car horns that cut through. It’s something that comes with this new life.

He used to love nighttime, after Steve fell asleep and the street was still loud. He loved the sticky sheets of summer and the frozen toes of winter, and he loved the crisp page turn of favorite books, read by streetlight trickling through the yellowed glass.

Steve shakes him awake on the bad nights. Bucky finds the fingers of his hand curled tightly around Steve’s wrist, his teeth grit together hard enough to give him a migraine, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. He can’t catch his breath. He considers, for a moment, the possibility that he’s forgotten how to breathe entirely, or else never knew how. There’s something about the air that doesn’t sit right in his lungs.

He extricates his hand from Steve’s wrist, hauls himself into sitting so he can hunch over his lap.

Foggy and scared, it doesn’t cross his mind to ask Steve to leave, or to do so himself. Quite the opposite, he is terrified that Steve won’t stay.

Their room is over-warm. And it is theirs, now, this room with the big windows, no curtains, a closet too big for only Steve’s clothes, almost begging for Bucky to bring his own; this room with the sock pairs beginning to mingle in the drawer. This room is theirs. The hand on Bucky’s forearm is Steve’s, this skin his own, and he repeats this to himself until Steve’s voice finally finds its way between the waves of static that have come, again and again and mercilessly again, since Bucky woke up.

“Buck?” it asks.

“You okay?” it asks.

“You need some water?” it asks.

And then, it asks nothing. For a moment. As Steve moves his hand from Bucky’s forearm, down to tangle with Bucky’s own fingers. They slot perfectly, despite how they’ve grown and scarred. “You remember the code?” Steve asks.

One for yes. Two for no.

Bucky squeezes once.

 

In an over-crowded, over-loud movie theater, their code expands. One tap, by Steve, on the back of Bucky’s hand when Bucky passes him a small handful of M&M’s. Bucky looks away from the screen, at him, and there’s no question.

Steve’s heartbeat settles when Bucky’s hand slides to fit with his.

They let go after the movie. Steve’s not sure whether they’re avoiding the topic, but he lets the moment pass, agreeing to Bucky’s suggestion of dinner out.

 

It becomes a habit.

At first, only when things are overwhelming. Then, when things get a bit too crowded. When they fall asleep, and finally when they walk to the coffee shop down the street and sit in their favorite corner table--Steve with drip coffee and cream, Bucky with a scone and the latest tooth-rotting escapade of a drink.

Hands held under the table.

Conversation easy, eyes soft. Everything perfectly, beautifully quiet.

 

-

 

Sam notices.

They’re running, six in the morning; they’ve both added an extra layer to protect against the creeping cold. They’re on mile number two when Sam finally brings it up.

“So,” he starts. “How’s Bucky?”

“Good. I mean, he got his driver’s license in the mail yesterday and he’s been complaining about that.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Says 1987.”

Sam laughs. “Couldn’t exactly put 1917, huh?”

“Well, it would probably catch a few eyes. He doesn’t really look like he’s turning a hundred in four months.”

“That he doesn’t.”

“But yeah, other than that, he’s good. He’s been buying records.”

This much is true. Steve knows it’s not the answer that Sam is looking for, that there’s something very specific Sam is trying to get at, but he figures he might as well avoid it as long as he can get away with it. So he dances around the real question as long as Sam will let him. Talks about Bucky cleaning their apartment, clearing a shelf for the records he’s bought. He doesn’t bring up the clothes that have made their way to Steve’s own dresser, or how Bucky has started leaving the bathroom door open when he showers. How he sings along to the same songs he did when they were kids, mixed in with a few current bands. Only, Bucky says, the ones that at least _sound_ like they could be older.

He doesn’t bring up Bucky’s hand finding a home in Steve’s own, though he knows Sam saw it happen yesterday.

Tuesday nights have become a standing dinner tradition again with Steve and Bucky, though they’re the hosts now, and only to Sam and Natasha. Sam comes each week bearing a bottle of wine, Natasha comes armed with stacks of take-out menus. They eat in Steve and Bucky’s living room. Steve and Bucky on the couch, Sam in the chair, Natasha on the coffee table.

Bucky didn’t talk much on those nights, at least not at first. Recently, though, his quiet stare has begun to melt into something a little more welcoming, and he has thrown his wry voice into conversation more often than not.

He tells stories sometimes. Usually ones about Steve, the same way he always did with the Commandos. He tells them like they’re straight from a book--all oversold drama and self-admitted hyperbole.

He was telling them about Coney Island when he looked at Steve, soft and teasing eyes and a half-smile, and Steve had to. The next time Bucky’s hand was within grabbing distance, Steve plucked it from the air, tangled his own fingers between Bucky’s, and settled their hands on the couch between them. Bucky didn’t pause, didn’t even hesitate in his story. He continued on, a faint squeeze of Steve’s hand the only recognition of a change.

This is, Steve’s sure, why Sam is asking so pointedly about Bucky today. Of course, Sam asks pointedly about Bucky more often than not.

“Steve,” Sam says.

“What? He’s good.”

Sam stops running. He nods his head in the direction of a nearby café. Steve gets a bottle of water, Sam a tall glass of orange juice. They split an order of hashbrowns, though Steve eats most of them.

The plate is nearly empty when Sam brings it up again.

“So are you two together now?” Sam asks.

Steve nearly chokes on the shredded potatoes. He washes the offending bite down with a gulp of water, and, as soon as he can, says, “No.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to be?”

Steve takes another bite and chews it slowly, his jaw tight. He considers. “It’s not like that.”

“Not like what?”

“He doesn’t feel that way.”

Sam smiles, that smile that Steve has come to know so well, that smile that Steve loves and hates. The smile that says he knows. Because Sam always knows, somehow, and Steve has never quite figured out how he manages that.

“Steve.”

“Sam.”

“Have you asked him?”

And that’s the thing. He hasn’t. Not in eighty-eight years of knowing Bucky, and however many of loving him--probably, Steve admits to himself, eighty-eight of those, too. Not once has he asked, not once has he said something. Because maybe this can’t kill him, maybe it shouldn’t be scary. But it’s Bucky, and it’s loving him, and that has always felt a little too big for Steve to tackle just right.

“He doesn’t feel that way.”

“Do you?”

A smaller question. At least, one whose answer has been waiting on the tip of his tongue for as long as he can remember. Waiting for someone to prompt it into being. For the first time: “Yes.”

 

-

 

Bucky joins Steve at Sam’s New Year’s Eve party. It’s a somewhat small affair, in Sam’s brownstone a mile or so from Steve and Bucky’s apartment. Steve spends a good portion of the evening talking to Carol; she’s about a foot shorter than Steve and at least a mile more intimidating.

Sam takes the opportunity to introduce Bucky to Claire, who Sam has been mentioning for months now. She has a confident voice, and Bucky likes her immediately.

He settles on the couch to talk to her and Sam; Claire tells emergency room horror stories, and Bucky finds himself laughing more than he has since the forties.

“What about you?” she asks. “Sam says Steve used to get into all sorts of trouble.”

“Used to?”

Her face stretches into a wide smile. “Well now I have to know.”

He leans in conspiratorially, “He got six black eyes in 1941. Six! Two were at the same time, but still. They barely had time to heal before he was getting his ass kicked again.”

An hour passes, then two. And Bucky can breathe--here, with Steve a few feet away and an easy kindness in Sam and Claire’s laughter.

They leave when Bucky spots Steve yawning, around ten. Bucky catches his eye and nods towards the door. There’s a silent agreement, and they excuse themselves.

Natasha winks at them when they pass her, but Bucky chooses not to think too long on that.

 

-

 

They lay on the couch when they get home, Bucky’s head pillowed on Steve’s chest and his arm wrapped tightly around Steve’s waist. His breath is warm through Steve’s shirt, and the New Year’s Eve special is quiet in the background while they talk.

Bucky taps his finger against Steve’s side. “Best New Year’s Eve ever. Go.”

“Tonight.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. 1939 was pretty good, too.”

Bucky’s silent while he considers. “Is that the year your mom took us out to dinner and you got food poisoning?”

“Yeah.”

Bucky shifts so his arm is on Steve’s chest, chin resting on his hand. He looks surprised. “How is _that_ your best New Year’s Eve?”

Steve shrugs, as much as he can in this position. “You stayed over.”

“I did that every year!”

“You started teaching me how to dance that night. Before the food poisoning.”

Bucky smiles. “I did.”

Steve bites his lip. “Okay. How about yours?”

“1939 was pretty great, but I think I’ll have to go with tonight.”

“I think it’s cheating to say the same thing as I did, but I’ll let it slide. Best thing about 2016?” Steve asks.

“New coffee maker.” Bucky laughs. “That’s probably not true, but it’s up there. You?”

“An apartment with a bathtub.”

“In the bathroom!”

“In the bathroom. Any New Year’s resolutions?”

“I thought you said New Year’s resolutions were just empty promises that people made in January.”

“They usually are.”

“Usually?” Steve nods, so Bucky continues. “Okay. I want to be more honest this year.”

Steve nods. “Yeah, I like that. Me too.”

Bucky scoffs. “You’re the most honest person I’ve ever met.”

“Not about everything.”

 

-

 

When Bucky wakes up the next morning, Steve is, for once, still in bed with him, and asleep. He’s facing Bucky, and it takes Bucky a few moments to remember that they fell asleep mid-conversation last night; Steve’s voice had gone fuzzy with sleep, and Bucky’s eyelids had been too heavy to keep propped open anymore. He’s not sure who drifted off first, but he does know that they’ve slept far past Steve’s usual early morning wake-up.

Bucky takes a few moments to relish the moment, Steve’s hand curled against Bucky’s bare chest and his breathing even. Eyelashes long against his slightly-pink cheeks. Hair mussed from sleep and golden in the early-morning sunlight.

Bucky nudges him awake.

“Hey,” he says, voice quieted.

“Hey.” The word is slow and elongated. It’s confused, like Steve always sounds when he first wakes up. “What time is it?”

“Eleven. Were you supposed to go running with Sam today?”

“Texted him earlier,” Steve says. “Told him I wasn’t coming.”

So Steve must have woken up earlier to do that. He must have gotten up, either by habit or because he had to go to the bathroom, sent Sam that text, and then curled back into bed with Bucky. It wasn’t an accident, and something about that sets Bucky’s chest to fluttering. He smiles at the ceiling and asks, “You want breakfast?”

Steve shifts closer to Bucky, so his lips are just barely ghosting against Bucky’s skin when he says, “In a minute.”

“Okay. In a minute.”

 

-

 

“Steve,” Becca starts.

Bucky is in the kitchen, doing the dishes and chattering with Josie.

“Becca,” he responds. They’re in the living room, curtains thrown open and drop cloths on the ground while they paint. He adds another swipe of yellow and, when only silence answers him, looks up at Becca.

She has a look on her face--the one she’s always shared with Bella. The one that says that Steve, or usually Bucky, is being an idiot.

“Steve.”

“Becca.”

She laughs. She sounds young when she does that, and she does it often. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember that she’s not still the young woman she was when Steve and Bucky left for the war. She’s had more of a life than either of them. More than both of them combined.

“When are you going to tell him?”

“What?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m getting old, Steve. I’d like to be at the wedding, so if you could speed things up a little bit, we’d all appreciate it.”

Steve, eyes wide and mouth pressed closed, turns back to his painting.

 

-

 

Bucky begins keeping a map of bookstores; most of them are in Brooklyn, but he expands his search to all five of the boroughs when he has the time for a trek. He refuses, however, to touch Jersey with a ten-foot pole.

They go together. Walk in linked but separate somewhere around the history section, where Steve veers into the artists and Bucky wanders into the fiction section.

His favorite stores are the secondhand ones, where the books’ smell give away their age, and the covers are already bent. The books in these stores vary more. Steve can get lost in the artist biographies--Frida Kahlo and J. C. Leyendecker and dozens of others--while Bucky leafs through the cheap science fiction novels that he never lost his affinity for.

They’re different everywhere they go. The stores carry whatever they’ve had the good fortune of finding, and the stock shifts each day.

The city is in the middle of a February blizzard when Bucky wakes up to unfamiliar sounds drifting in from the living room, the spot next to him cold. He gets up to investigate, for once awake without coffee, and finds Steve, legs crossed and sitting on the floor, surrounded by unassembled wooden boards. He looks both lost and furious.

“What’s this?” Bucky asks.

“It’s a bookshelf.” As though Bucky should have been able to surmise this from a pile of screws and an array of unidentifiable pieces.

“I don’t think that’ll hold books very well, Steve,” Bucky says as he walks into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of the coffee he knows Steve will have already made. “Usually people recommend putting those things together before you try to use them for storage, but I admire your commitment to originality.”

“Fuck off,” Steve calls from the next room.

“Mmm.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Love you too, asshole. That’s what you get for waking me up.”

He finds Steve looking at him, amused smile resting gently on his face. “I’ve been up since five. I lost patience.”

“I can tell.” Bucky gestures his coffee at the pieces. “Why don’t you just use the instructions?”

“I threw them away,” Steve admits.

“What? Why?”

“Because it looked easy!” His wide eyes are almost frighteningly familiar, exactly as they were when they were younger--angry and fed up and expecting the problem to magically fix itself.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

 

The shelf, when it’s finally built, goes in their bedroom. It’s a dark brown thing, with six sturdy shelves that are already half-full. Steve reaches into the dresser drawer and takes out a book Bucky doesn’t immediately recognize. He sets it on the eye-level shelf while Bucky admires their handiwork.

“What’s that?” Bucky asks.

Steve gestures. _Go see for yourself_.

It’s a familiar copy, green and old and nearly-broken along the spine, of _Romeo and Juliet._

“I got it from Becca.”

 

Bucky opens the window onto their fire escape.

 

-

 

“The wait’s going to be about twenty minutes,” the hostess tells them.

“Okay,” Steve says. “No problem.”

“Would you and your boyfriend prefer inside or outside seating?” she asks.

And Steve realizes that they’re holding hands, their shoulders pressed together, and they’re out for dinner at seven on a Friday night. It’s not an altogether ridiculous assumption that she’s making, but it still makes his palms go sweaty and his mind go blank. He doesn’t say anything, instead just clamping his mouth shut while she stares at him expectantly.

“Sir?”

“Inside,” Bucky chimes in.

“Can do! Can I get a name?”

“Barnes.”

“Perfect.” She writes it on the list and asks, “Can I get you anything to drink while you wait?”

“I think we’re okay, but thank you.”

She nods and walks away, and Steve keeps staring ahead.

“Is that okay?” Bucky asks.

“Is what okay?” He can tell that his voice is too loud, and Bucky’s expression confirms it.

“Inside. It’s kind of cold, and I didn’t bring a jacket.”

Oh. That. “Yeah,” Steve says. “Sounds good.”

The other thing was okay, too. Or rather, the absence of the other thing--no correction, just that assumption left hanging in the air, unchallenged. But he’s not sure if Bucky was asking about that, too, if he wants to know, or even if it really matters.

 

-

 

They don’t plan to get a dog. It sort of happens, as most things with do in their lives, as an accident.

The park near their house is absolutely full of them. Bucky makes Steve stop every few paces to pet each one, to crouch down near the ground to scratch behind their ears and let them lick his face. He takes pictures with them, no matter how much Steve teases him for it. His camera roll is full of dogs and candids of Steve.

Sometimes, when Steve is busy with other things, Bucky will walk to the park on his own and plant himself in the grass, hoping for a dog or two to run up to him. He brings a blanket, a coffee, and pockets full of candy to keep himself busy. He lays, left leg bent and right ankle resting on left knee, on his back, book held above his head, pausing from his reading only when a shadow falls across the pages.

“You know,” Sam says, the third time Bucky makes him stop on their walk, this time for a squat bulldog. “There’s a shelter pretty close to here. If you and Steve ever wanted to adopt one.”

Bucky whips his head around. “Really?”

“Yeah. Adoption fee’s like fifty bucks or something. I’ve helped a few of the people at the VA pick one out.”

Bucky is dialing Steve’s number before Sam can get another sentence out, and they’re at the shelter within the hour.

They stop at every kennel, Bucky placing his fingers against the bars in offering; some of the dogs stop to lick him, or to wag their tails enthusiastically. Bucky insists each one they look at is perfect.

“I love them all, Steve. How are we supposed to pick one?”

Steve, sitting on the floor next to him, grins.

In the end, it’s not hard at all to choose. She’s four, all broad shoulders and floppy ears and restless tail. Her tag says she’s a lab mix, though it doesn’t say what she’s mixed with. Her grin makes it hard to miss, though--it’s that same goofy smile Bucky has seen on every pit bull they’ve run into at the dog park. She has some ridiculous name that the shelter has given her, but the volunteer assures them that she won’t mind a new one.

So they stay in the visiting room for an hour with her; she runs circles around them both, already deft at fetch. She knows how to shake hands, and the volunteer tells them that she’s been working on play dead.

“Oh, we can finish teaching her,” Bucky says.

She’s terrible at staying off of people, gets too excited every few moments and barrels into one or both of them, paws on their chests, but Steve points out that if there’s anyone that won’t bother, it’s them. They’re a little difficult to knock down, after all.

The dog, tuckered out, is laying pressed against Bucky’s left side, her head tucked on top of his shoulder, and Steve lies down next to them.

“Any name ideas?” Steve asks.

“You know? I think I actually like Winifred. We could call her Fred.”

“I like it,” Steve says.

“I do, too.”

And so they get their wallets out, pay the adoption fee, and spend the next half hour or so filling out paperwork with their new dog lain across their feet in the office. Or rather, they take turns filling out the paperwork while the other one bends over and scratches behind her ears.

When they bring her into their apartment, she spends a few minutes wandering around, getting used to her surroundings. She looks confused, and a bit lost, but every time she sees Steve or Bucky, her tail gives a quick wag. Bucky sits down on the couch and pats the cushion next to him. She jumps up, lays down, and curls in on herself, tucked close against Bucky’s hip, and is asleep within moments.

 

-

 

Their lives are not all quiet. They do, after all, have jobs, and rather dangerous ones at that. It feels like every other week that they’re out of the state, or out of the country, risking their asses for something or other.

Every time, Bucky threatens that this is the last time he’ll do it, that he’s ready to wash his hands ( _hand_ , he says wryly) of the whole thing. Every time, Steve nods his head along as though he believes a single word of it.

Of course, when Bucky is offered a Captain America suit of his own--black sleeves and stripes in the middle, a stupid helmet just like Steve’s--he accepts it. Sam gets one, too, mostly white. Bucky pretends his acceptance is begrudging, but he’s beaming while he slips into the outfit and parades it around.

Their lives are not all quiet. They’re probably just as perilous as they always have been, but for some reason, it all feels different. It feels like they’re invincible. Like they’ve come back from the dead enough times that the world has finally stopped trying to kill them.

 

-

 

He’s not entirely sure when he starts writing the book. Steve has been urging him to do so for months now. There is no grand beginning. There is no moment of decision, no outlining, no brainstorming. There are only snippets in a notebook that has stopped being about memories and transformed into something else. Created words and imagined descriptions, a story entirely removed from his own personal war.

And then before he knows it, Steve is helping him find new homes for the furniture of Bucky’s old room. They’re donating the bed frame and buying two desks, an easel for Steve, drop cloths and notebooks and canvases and butcher paper. Bucky’s outlines, constructed of note cards and scrap paper and scribbled-on napkins, consume one wall while Steve’s art blooms against another.

This room, where Bucky tossed and turned and nightmared for months, becomes a place of creation.

They spend their days off here. It’s near-silent, save for their lunch break and the occasional request for input. Bucky wonders, if they had been born in a different time as different people, whether they still would have found their way here.

He imagines, in this impossible world, that his stories may have been sadder. They may have been the tragic stuff of all his favorites growing up. But in this world, looking across the room to see Steve paint-splattered and lovely, Bucky allows himself the luxury of happy endings.

 

-

 

The apartment smells of spaghetti sauce, one of the few things Bucky retained from his ma’s cooking lessons. Steve is sitting at the kitchen table, sketching outline after outline of Bucky’s back--stretching to grab something from the spice cabinet, bent nearly in half to look in the fridge for the basil leaves, curving as he sways to music and stirs the large pot on the stove. They’re all broad, shoulders tapering into neck, which disappears into his familiar short hair. It’s styled differently than it was in the forties—just slightly longer on the top, a little of the curl allowed to stay, at least a half-inch taller than it ever used to be. Steve loves it. He loves curving his pencil around the curls and the small stray pieces by Bucky’s ears.

When Bucky turns, coring tomatoes right on the counter the same way Becca’s wife does, his profile is soft. Square jaw and pointed nose, but relaxed lines and an easy smile. Bucky catches him looking and shoots him a wink.

“What?” Bucky asks.

“What song is this?”

“ _If they ask me, I could write a book about the way you walk and whisper and look. I could write a preface on how we met so the world would never forget,_ ” Bucky sings, scraping the tomatoes into the pot. “Ella Fitzgerald, Steve. Come on.”

Steve smiles and looks down at his sketchbook.

He begins a new set of lines, Bucky facing towards the onlooker. His mouth open mid-lyric; Steve can’t remember the last time he drew Bucky with his mouth closed, or really if he ever has. It seems like it would be a waste to draw him like that. It would be dishonest. It’s one of Steve’s favorite things about Bucky--that he’s always making one noise or another, that he is so rarely quiet. It’s one of the many things Bucky has grown back into since they’ve begun rebuilding their lives together.

Steve doesn’t notice Bucky walking over to him, he doesn’t notice him standing at his elbow, doesn’t have a chance to flip the page before Bucky can see the dozens of sketches Steve has been doing of him. Before he can make any excuses, Bucky is holding out his hand, palm up, an offering. Steve rolls his eyes, but takes it.

“I hate dancing,” Steve says, nose crinkled.

“Mhmm.”

“I’m terrible at it.”

“You are.”

“You were making dinner.”

“I was!”

“Shouldn’t you get back to that?”

“Shouldn’t you stop making excuses?” Bucky counters, hand low on Steve’s back and pulling him in. He smiles, his lip catching on that one crooked tooth the way it always has. Steve has to stop himself from reaching out, running his thumb along Bucky’s dry lip, hooked on that tooth; he’s trained himself not to, but it’s gotten more difficult lately. It used to seem like something unattainable, a terrible idea, but there’s been something about the last few months. It’s gotten harder to stop himself.

And then Bucky is humming to the music, holding their hands between their chests so Steve can feel Bucky’s voice vibrating inside his ribs.

The record is staticky, reminiscent of the radio and of nights like these so many years ago. The sauce simmers behind Bucky; Bucky’s voice lilts. Gentle.

The laundry is going down the hall, underwear and shirts and socks all mixed together; they’ve stopped sorting it out, instead folding it and placing it all into the same set of drawers. The left sides are Bucky’s, the rights Steve’s, though the difference is almost negligible. More often than not, Steve will have to shift at least one undershirt over to Bucky’s side, or sort through Bucky’s neat stacks of boxers to find one of his own pairs of briefs. Not that he minds.

The lights from the city are filtering through their window; it’s dark too early, but their apartment always has plenty of light turned on. Over Bucky’s shoulder, Steve can see their reflection in the living room window, swaying and sweet. His hand curling around the spot where Bucky’s neck meets his shoulder, where there’s the slightest dusting of flour on Bucky’s blue shirt. Steve catches himself smiling a bit too honestly, and shifts to look instead to Bucky.

Who is looking at him, too. Who has stopped singing. Whose mouth is just the slightest bit open. Who is so close, so temptingly close and impossibly beautiful in this moment. In every moment.

So Steve reaches his hand up and hesitates, his hand hovering between them. And he settles his thumb in the small dimple of Bucky’s chin. It fits exactly as he’s always imagined it would, like Steve’s own hand lovingly carved the mark in Bucky’s face. It sets his heart still for a moment before its beat picks up again, too quick and loud in his ears and over the soft sounds of their lives.

Bucky doesn’t ask what he’s doing.

It smells of home--their new home, this one they have carefully and intentionally created together--and Bucky stills their swaying.

And if Steve isn’t mistaken, the space between them is rather smaller than it was a few moments ago, when he’d last registered it. He can, he thinks, feel Bucky’s breath when Bucky says, “Hi.”

And then the door is opening, and Sam’s voice is elbowing its way into Steve’s consciousness.

“I brought wine,” he announces, as he does every week. “Where are you guys?”

Steve backs away from Bucky, tripping over his own feet when he calls back, “Kitchen!”

Sam steps around the corner, holding the offending bottle. He’s looking at his phone when he says, “Whose turn is it to pick the movie tonight? Nat wants to know.” He looks up. “Oh. Did I interrupt something?”

It must be written on their faces, Steve figures. He can feel his own cheeks burning, and he blurts, “No,” at the same time Bucky says the opposite.

Sam tilts his head, raises a wry eyebrow. When neither Steve nor Bucky offers any more explanation, Sam soldiers on. “Okay. So whose turn is it?”

Bucky clears his throat. “Steve. I picked last week.”

“Oh, no way.” It’s Natasha, who has walked in without Steve noticing and is toeing her shoes off in the kitchen doorway. “I sat through _Atonement_ last week. I’m not watching some documentary.”

Steve doesn’t fight it. Instead, he gives a weak laugh and leans against the counter. “Fine. So what are we watching instead?”

He doesn’t hear her answer, distracted instead by Bucky’s tense shoulders over the pot of spaghetti sauce.

 

-

 

They go on like this, for a few months. There are moments when each of them thinks to himself.

_Oh._

_Maybe._

 

_-_

 

“What are you reading?” Steve asks, words slurred with toothpaste.

“What?”

Steve spits into the sink. “I asked what you’re reading.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. “Some Márquez, but I’m not really focusing.”

Steve wipes his mouth on the towel. “Why’s that? Is the book not good?” He knows that’s not the answer, because Bucky’s read that one at least four times now. It has post-it notes sticking out at every angle from the sides.

Steve leans back so he can see into their bedroom through the bathroom doorway.

Bucky is laying in that way he has. Leaned back on the pillows, one leg bent and in the air, the other thrown a little wider than is strictly appropriate. He holds his paperback lazily, in one hand. Upon closer examination, Steve realizes that the pajama pants Bucky is wearing are Steve’s, one of his older pairs. They’re well-worn and a bit too long on Bucky. The shirt, too, Steve thinks is his own. Somehow, this is more distracting than Bucky’s usual sleepwear; that is to say, a pair of boxers and very little else.

“No, it’s great.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Bucky gives a faint smile and shrugs, one eyebrow raised. He’s staring intently at Steve, and so Steve says the first thing that comes to mind.

“You just enjoying the view?” He even gives a slight shake of his hips to punctuate what is meant to be a joke.

“Maybe I am, Rogers,” Bucky asks.

And Steve can feel the heat spread up his neck and across his face, and he has to duck back into the bathroom before he can respond.

In the mirror, he can see that his face and shoulders are red; the small section of his chest that’s visible underneath his t-shirt is splotchy with surprise. He leans against the counter and stares at the sink when he says, “Very funny, Buck.”

Bucky gives a hum. One of assent or of interest, Steve isn’t sure, but he makes himself believe it’s the former.

 

-

 

Steve has been drawing for hours now, hunched over the same page, sketchbook propped on his bent knees. He had sketched for half an hour or so before settling into a drawing, and he hasn’t taken his attention from that page since. His eyebrows are drawn low on his forehead. There’s a pile of eraser shavings surrounding him. Bucky has interrupted every so often with a line from the book of poetry he’s reading--Allen Ginsberg, angry and Jewish and gay and absolutely one of Bucky’s favorite finds from his lost years--and Steve has given appreciative hums each time.

Finally, when it’s been three hours without a real word from Steve, Bucky marks his place with a finger and closes the book. “What are you drawing?” he asks.

“You.”

Steve says it so matter-of-factly that Bucky has to take a moment to assure himself that he heard correctly. Steve adds a few more swipes of his pencil and looks at it assessingly. He turns the sketchbook around and sure enough, there Bucky is.

There’s always been something particular about the way Steve draws him. It’s nothing like seeing his own reflection, though Steve is extremely talented. There’s an added something that Bucky has never been quite able to place. It’s like he’s seeing himself through a fine layer of glass. Like Steve has framed him, not to hang on a wall or to preserve, but to admire. Bucky’s harsh edges are not softened. The opposite--his jaw is just as sharp, perhaps even more so, than it is in photos. His eyes are large and questioning, and his fingers are squared at the ends. His shoulders broad and his hair dark.

Steve has drawn him like this at least a hundred times. With no lies, somehow different and yet more accurate than a mirror would show him.

And Steve says it so simply.

 _You,_ which really means, _You, of course. Who else?_

And it’s true. It’s Bucky.

Who else?

 

-

 

“Hey,” Bucky says. He’s sprawled on the couch. One leg thrown over the back, arm behind his head. Steve has been cooking for well over an hour now, throwing ingredients into their slow cooker, chopping vegetables and checking the recipe every few minutes.

“Yeah?” Steve calls back.

“You look good today.”

It’s not the first time he’s said it. It is, however, the first time Steve doesn’t roll his eyes.

Instead, he looks up from the cookbook and, if Bucky’s not mistaken, darts his eyes down Bucky’s body once. “Yeah?”

He could expand. He could say that he loves Steve’s hair growing out a bit longer, closer to how it used to look. He could say that Steve’s godforsaken tight shirt has been distracting him all day. Or that he’s been wanting to run his fingers along Steve’s drawn eyebrows for hours now. Instead, he says, “Yeah.”

“You don’t look so bad yourself.”

 

-

 

Bucky is the only person who really loves watching Steve’s documentaries with him. Steve thinks it might be because Bucky’s the only other person who should have been alive for these things but somehow missed the boat anyway. He’s the only other person who has the same morbid interest in everything he should have seen but couldn’t. So they watch the History Channel every weekend, sometimes the same specials they’ve already seen, and they drift in and out of paying attention to them. Some are more informative than others, but by far the funniest are the ones that are so-called documentaries on Captain America. Steve always tries to change the channel during these, but Bucky won’t let him. He’s too busy laughing over the old, grainy footage of Steve’s USO tour, the tights and the cloth cowl and the ridiculous song.

There are some--all of them, really--that miss the mark with the truth. They miss by about a mile, but it’s nothing but funny to Steve and Bucky. They tell the story of Steve’s strict authority with the very serious Howling Commandos, and while the TV drones on about these things, Steve and Bucky laugh and remind each other of the ridiculous things they all did.

Some of the specials have sections committed just to Bucky, all clearly made long before Bucky came back. They call him a war hero, Cap’s right-hand man; none have the air of confusion that has surrounded Bucky’s name in the media over the last few years. The only question they pose about him is whether he was only Steve’s best friend, or something more entirely. The historians pop up one after another, analyzing the letters that were taken from Steve and Bucky’s abandoned apartment, the ones Bucky sent before Steve found him again. _Yours, Bucky_ , over and over across the screen in Bucky’s own familiar handwriting. They sit quietly through it; after all, none of this is anything they haven’t both already read.

( _Was James Buchanan Barnes gay? It’s a question that will haunt us forever._ “Or they could just ask me. I’d be happy to tell them,” Bucky says. Steve still does not ask.)

 

On the nights that they sink into their couch to watch these documentaries, Bucky lays his head in Steve’s lap, the back of his neck resting on Steve’s thigh. He turns his head towards the TV but looks up at Steve whenever he wants to make a comment.

Tonight, the special is on Bigfoot sightings since the sixties. They’re concentrated in the northwest region of the United States, the documentary claims, and there have been a handful of pictures presented as proof. They’re all grainy things, featuring what looks to be a very tall, very hairy person.

Bucky is just saying, “You know? I think Bigfoot is real. I’ve seen weirder shit,” when Steve sets his hand in Bucky’s hair.

“Yeah?” Steve asks. He waits for Bucky to protest; he knows, after all, how long Bucky spends getting his hair in order. When nothing comes, Steve asks, “What have you seen that’s weirder than Bigfoot?”

Bucky looks at him, deadpan. “You.”

“Good point.”

“Mhmm.”

Steve combs his fingers through Bucky’s carefully-arranged curls. They’re soft, and Steve takes a moment to appreciate it. It’s exactly as he always imagined it would be, the hundreds and hundreds of times he’s forced his hand not to do exactly what he’s doing now. Bucky’s eyes drift closed as he says, “Let’s find Bigfoot, Steve.”

 

-

 

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says. He’s nudging Bucky, early in the morning. Bucky groans and rolls until his limbs are sprawled across the whole bed, his face buried in a pillow.

“No,” he grumbles.

“Bucky, you gotta wake up.”

“All I gotta do is die someday, and the jury’s still out on that one.” He gives another groan. “Fuck. Too many words.”

Steve shakes his arm. Bucky turns his head just enough to glare at Steve with one eye. “Buck, we have to go. Our ride to the airport is waiting.”

Bucky squints. “What.”

“Sam got a mission in Arizona, so he cancelled our run this morning, but I told him we’d take the mission off his hands.”

Bucky slams his face back into his pillow. “Why the _fuck_ would you do that? Sam is on Cap duty on the weekends. It is the _weekend_. _Fuck,_ Steve.”

“Arizona, Bucky.”

“Hot. Cacti.”

“Grand Canyon,” Steve says. There’s excitement sitting light on every single letter, and Bucky’s heart gives a leap.

He turns his head again.

“What?”

“The mission is a really easy one. Just a few hours and then it’s only a hundred-mile drive.”

“The Grand Canyon?”

Steve shrugs. “You said you wanted to go.”

“In 1943.”

Steve’s face falls. “Do you not want to go anymore?”

Bucky gets out of bed as fast as he can. “No, I still want to go. I want to go.” He shoots Steve a grin as he struggles into a pair of pants. “How long are we there for?”

Steve shrugs. “Haven’t bought the return tickets yet.”

Bucky catches his bottom lip between his teeth, trying not to let his grin consume his whole face. “Can we stay a while?”

“I packed a week of clothes. We can always buy laundry detergent.”

 

-

 

They take a vacation.

For the first time in their lives, they allow themselves a month (two) to breathe, and to go where they want. It’s the only time they really take advantage of their well-padded bank accounts. Clint agrees to watch Fred while they’re away; he sends them pictures every day, and Steve starts to get the idea that Clint might just like them for their dog. She’s drinking from a coffee mug in one picture (captioned “it’s water”), and in the next, she’s sleeping with her head on top of Clint’s own dog’s back (captioned “best friends”).

She is being cared for, and so Steve and Bucky buy a truck in Arizona, from a used car lot. They pay in cash, and they drive.

First is the Grand Canyon, of course.

_Do you ever think about the Grand Canyon?_

Yes and yes and yes, repeated over and over in Steve’s head as the make the short trip west.

It’s exactly as beautiful as the pictures Bucky has been showing Steve on his phone since they got on the plane back at JFK. More beautiful, in a way that nearly knocks Steve from his feet. There are tourists there, of course, but it’s quiet. The mutual awe of something bigger than any of them.

Steve and Bucky sit on top of a picnic bench, and Bucky’s hand fumbles for Steve’s. They stare for hours, until they start to shiver and realize that the sun is long since down.

“Should we find a hotel?” Steve asks.

Bucky squeezes his hand. “Do we have blankets in the truck?”

“A few.”

Bucky grins. “How do you feel about some stargazing?”

And so they lay their blankets down along the bed of the truck, all but the one they tuck themselves under. Steve lays his head on Bucky’s shoulder while Bucky points out constellations.

“How do you know all of these?” Steve asks.

“Watched a lot of specials when I couldn’t sleep.”

“You could wake me up.”

“Hasn’t happened in a while.”

Steve takes a deep breath. Bucky smells of dust and detergent, with that faint Bucky smell laying underneath it all. He’s warm, like he always is. He has always been so warm.

“So what’s your favorite constellation?”

“Orion,” Bucky answers. He doesn’t hesitate, so Steve taps a finger against Bucky’s chest.

“Why?” There must be a reason for an answer so quick.

“Because it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to find. It’s the first one I learned.”

“Why?”

Bucky shrugs. “It was on the program I was watching and it’s the only one that stuck at the time. You were asleep on the couch next to me.”

Steve grips Bucky’s shirt a little tighter and asks, for the first time since they were teenagers, “Tell me the story?”

 

-

 

There are maps in the glove compartment, but they rarely look at them. It seems a little silly to consult them when they really don’t care much where they’re going. It’s something completely new for them both. Until this, they had never been farther West than Wisconsin, and it’s like a completely different country out here. The roads are wider. There are big cities, but they largely pass those by. They go instead for the scenic route.

Bucky spends hours making playlists. It’s old songs and new, all mixed together. Frank Sinatra and then the Alabama Shakes, and somehow it works. It feels natural. Bucky sings along to every song, loudly, with the windows down. His hair is a mess by the time they get out of the car at the end of the day, and Steve brushes it back with his fingers before they go inside anywhere.

They’re at the California-Oregon border when torrential rain hits, and they pull off in the closest town. They dash into a hotel just off the main road. It’s a few stories tall, grey in the middle of the storm. They’re dripping when they walk through the door, one duffle bag between them, and they haven’t stayed anywhere in two days. They both need to shave, and definitely shower, but they’re grinning from ear to ear, so Bucky figures they’re not in too sorry of shape.

“We only have kings left,” the front desk agent says. “That okay?”

“Yes,” Steve says. He gives her his card and takes Bucky’s hand in his own. The girl doesn’t say anything, but she does give a faint smile.

Once they’ve been handed their key card, they take the stairs to the third floor and Bucky collapses into the bed.

“Hotels are so gross,” he says, “but they cannot possibly be grosser than I am right now.”

“You want first shower?”

“You go ahead. I think my ass is numb.”

The thunder has started by the time they’ve each taken showers, and they sit cross-legged on the bed, knees against each other, watching out their window. It’s like another world, here. So different from their corner of the city. But the rain smells the same, and the sky’s yells sound the same, and they are the same.

 

-

 

When they finally get to Oregon’s northern border, they pause in Portland for a few days. There are rose gardens as old as they are, a science museum that has Bucky open-mouthed and joyous, a history museum hosting a special World War II exhibit that sets them both to laughing, and so much food that they feel at all times as though they’re about to burst. There are coffee shops on every corner, and more bikes than even Brooklyn. It’s just a fraction as populated as New York City, and they let themselves revel in the slower pace and the kinder people. It’s a city that still hasn’t given up on trying to be a town.

On their third day there, Steve wakes up early and goes for a run in the morning drizzle. He picks up two coffees--one his usual order, one the barista’s sweetest and most caffeinated recommendation in the largest size for Bucky--and nudges Bucky awake.

Bucky groans until the coffee is pressed into his hand; his hair is sticking up at strange angles, curly from his late night shower the day before. He takes a sip and grimaces.

“Bad?” Steve asks.

“Hot. Good.” He drinks it again and squints one eye open. “Good morning.”

Steve doesn’t try to hide his admiration. “Good morning. I found somewhere for us to go today.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Bookstore.”

 

It’s huge. Bigger than the barista told him it would be. The staff at the coffee shop had all been aghast that he hadn’t heard of it, that it wasn’t on his and Bucky’s itinerary while they were in the city. Of course, nothing was on their itinerary.

There’s a sign outside that proclaims that it’s the city of books, but it looks somewhat unassuming from the street. It’s brick and well-lit, like just about everything else in Portland has been. But they walk through the front door, and Steve hears Bucky catch his breath.

They find a map, which unfolds into a large diagram of four full floors and a mezzanine.

“Where do you want to go first?” Steve asks.

They spend hours amongst the poetry, the literature, the ceiling-high shelves of sci-fi novels, the hardback art books and biographies and anything and everything either of them can imagine.

 

-

 

Puget Sound, just barely south of Canada, is the perfect ending spot for their trip. Seattle is bigger than Portland, but it’s bordered by water just the same, and the residents are caffeinated and kind. The rain has begun to subside--May in the Northwest, Bucky decides, is the best air he’s ever breathed.

There are plenty of things to do in Seattle. Seafood and hiking, to name a few, and their toes dipped in the water of Puget Sound just the way they used to do on the docks in Brooklyn.

In the end, though, they get homesick.

Steve has started staring at the pictures of Fred a little too long, and they’re both guessing at the landmarks in the backgrounds of the photos, trying to decide where Clint or Natasha or Sam has taken her that day. Their favorite coffee shop is in the corner of one, and Bucky mentions something about needing a good Brooklyn bagel, and they look at each other, and they know.

They sell the truck that day, for far less than it’s worth, to two young women who are all smiles and enthusiastic thanks.

The next plane out of SeaTac to JFK is the next morning, early. They take a cab at four, laden with far more bags than they’d had at the outset of their trip, and buy their tickets at the counter. Steve hands Bucky the boarding pass assigned to a window seat. They’re both too big for the middle seats anyway, but Bucky likes to count the baseball diamonds.

When they land in New York and are waiting to get off the plane, Steve leans over to Bucky and says, “Too bad about Bigfoot.”

“We’ll catch him next time,” Bucky says.

 

-

 

Their apartment is the same.

Bucky’s not sure why, but some part of him had been expecting everything to have changed. Every time he has left home and come back, things have shifted. Things are never the same twice, Bucky has learned. Every breath changes things, and they have been breathing so much, so far from home, for so many weeks. But they get back and everything looks the same, still smells like laundry and dust. Bucky opens the windows to let in fresh air, and the afternoon sunlight is just as beautiful as he remembers it.

“I’m taking first shower this time,” Bucky says, dropping his duffel bag from his shoulder and shucking his shirt over his head. He tosses it to the ground and begins unbuttoning his pants as he walks down the hall. “I smell like plane,” he calls over his shoulder.

“I’ll start unpacking,” Steve says.

“And think about dinner! I’m starving!” Bucky says. “We should go grab food when I get out of the shower. Decide what you want.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Steve says.

Bucky’s laughing when he steps out of his underwear and cranks the water as warm as it will go. It scalds hot against his tanning skin, and it streams down his face in rivulets; he fools himself into thinking this water scrapes every layer of grime from him, that his bar of soap is only a formality. He knows, of course, that it isn’t true, but there has always been something about showers at home. Something that leaves him feeling scrubbed raw in the best possible way, like this fresh layer of skin is softer than he will ever be again.

He towels himself off, running the fabric over his hair a few times, roughly and quickly. He jerks the shower curtain open. In the fog of the mirror, there’s the outline of a message from Steve, written with his finger the way they do for each other. For the other to find the next time he showers. A time-release message.

This one says, _Welcome home, Buck._

Probably written the morning Steve woke Bucky up for the mission in Arizona; he’d known, even then, that Bucky would jump at the chance to go. He hadn’t been wrong, and Bucky finds his face sore from all the smiling he’s been doing. How well Steve knows him, and always has. It still comes as a surprise sometimes, somehow.

There is a small stack of clothes left on the bathroom counter. Sweats and a thin t-shirt and boxers. They’re taken from their dresser, not any of the ones Steve had packed for him on their trip. Steve must have set them there while Bucky had been singing, the noise drowned out by water in his ears.

It takes Bucky a few moments to figure out what it is that has changed.

He has been looking for something about the way the apartment looks, like the walls themselves will have rearranged themselves while they’ve been away. He’s been looking for something easy to spot, like it’s always been before. Like coming back to his apartment with Steve after being at training to find it messy and lonely. Like coming back to his life after decades of being someone else entirely, finding his footing uneven and needing to carve out something new for himself.

But then he’s walking into their bedroom, and Steve’s head is bent over the duffel bags, afternoon sun golden in his hair and along his profile, and it’s obvious.

It’s been shifting for months, nearly a year. It has come in subtle changes and quiet words, and it is Steve. He and Steve are so different now than they were before, or during the war, or decades after when they’d finally found each other again.

They are different people than they were.

It took Bucky a while to accept that. They are different, but something about them together is the same. It is the same bone-deep knowledge of each other.

They have avoided it for almost ninety years. They have danced around this, contorting themselves into any shape they had to in order to steer clear, and sometime in the last two months, they stopped. Bucky’s not sure when it happened, or how, or who allowed himself to be still first.

But there is Steve, haloed and heavenly and so very, very human, and they are not dancing anymore.

“Hey,” Bucky gets out. He clears his throat. “You choose something for dinner? I was thinking something spicy.”

Steve looks up.

He has that look in his eyes, the one Bucky would recognize a mile and a million years away. Hard and stubborn and determined, mind made up.

 _Oh,_ Bucky thinks.

There are a million things Steve could say, a million combinations of thousands of words and none of them would be surprising anymore. But the words he chooses are, “Can I kiss you?”

And somehow, some way, Steve is still knocking the air from his lungs.

 _Oh,_ Bucky thinks.

_Yes._

And he’s already closing the distance as he says it, his hand going to Steve’s waist and Steve’s to Bucky’s hair, and it’s like someone has struck a match across his heart and left it there to burn.

Steve’s hands are firm, framing his face, fingers stretching into Bucky’s curls. His chest is broad and warm, his hips just barely higher and narrower than Bucky’s. His nose is large as ever, that absurdly crooked thing, and it knocks against Bucky’s in their haste.

And his lips are soft. They are parted already when Bucky meets him halfway, and they don’t match up perfectly with Bucky’s. He half-catches Bucky’s chin, but they adjust themselves quickly, heads tilted to the left and fingers tightened and breath held.

Bucky has imagined this for decades. He has imagined it hungry, he has imagined it desperate, but there is absolutely nothing that could have prepared him for what it actually is. There is nothing that could have told him that Steve would kiss like honey--drizzled in waves, slow and sweet in a way uniquely its own. There is nothing that could have told him his lungs would turn weightless and his head would be swimming and a giddy laughter would bubble up through him, meeting Steve’s lips.

“Yeah?” Steve asks; he backs up just far enough that his lips can move separately from Bucky’s.

Bucky nods, a hasty thing, his voice breathy. “Yeah. Yes.”

It’s as long as he’s willing to pause from this. He is ruining Steve’s shirt with his tight grip, he’s sure; stretched far past where it should be, but he cannot pull Steve close enough. No matter how Steve holds Bucky’s head and tilts his own, it is impossible to close this distance enough.

“You know,” Bucky says, when Steve needs to pause to catch his breath and they tilt their foreheads together. “I wouldn’t exactly call you spicy.”

Steve throws his head back in laughter, and Bucky takes the opportunity to press a kiss, open-mouthed, against Steve’s collar bone. He tastes of salt and Steve, a taste that’s surprisingly familiar, though it’s not like anything else Bucky can call to mind.

“But I guess I’ll take it,” Bucky says. It’s met with a gasp and a rumbling laughter, and Bucky smiles against Steve’s skin. He rests his forehead on Steve’s shoulder and buries his nose in Steve’s t-shirt.

“Oh, you’ll take it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll settle for me?”

Bucky shrugs. “I _guess._ ”

Steve plants a kiss on the top of Bucky’s head, and Bucky tilts his head upward again, determined to memorize the exact way Steve’s lips curve against his own, the exact way Steve’s tongue feels.

When they break apart this time, Bucky’s hand slipping under the hem of Steve’s shirt and Steve’s stomach growling in hunger under Bucky’s fingertips, Bucky licks his lips.

“You want to order in?” Bucky asks.

Steve nods, his nose brushing against Bucky’s each time his head bobs. “Yes.”

“Perfect.”

 

It only takes a moment for them to call the order in, and an hour for it to be delivered. They use the hour well.

 

-

 

They lay in bed that night, curved like closed parentheses around a decades-long story.

“What are you thinking?” Steve asks, his finger tracing patterns along Bucky’s ribs. Their names, and a few more hearts than he’d admit, and endless swirls, connecting the infrastructure of Bucky’s body.

Bucky takes a deep breath, eyes drifting closed and lips drifting into a perfect crooked curve. “I’m thinking that I’ve been in love with you since I was eleven.”

Steve buries his grin in Bucky’s curls--thick and messy, dried around where Steve’s hands grabbed at them an hour before.

“You were eleven when we met.”

“Exactly.”

 

“You know that time you took me to the Brooklyn Museum?”

“We’ve been there a lot of times.”

“The first time.”

“For your birthday?”

“Yeah. I wanted to kiss you then.”

“You could have.”

 

They laugh over the year of teasing from the Commandos. How they had both let it happen, no protest and no corrections, because it was nice to know that someone, at least, had noticed.

Bucky wrinkles his nose. “Honestly, I think everyone noticed.”

“My mom did.”

“I know. She told me we were idiots.”

“When?”

Bucky shrugs. “You were asleep. She was sick.”

“She was right.”

Bucky captures Steve’s lips with his own, marvels that he can do this, now. “She definitely was. She _always_ was.”

 

“You said my name in your sleep one time.”

“I did?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“You did it at least once a week.”

“Steve Rogers, why the _fuck_ didn’t you wake me up?”

“Seemed like you were having a pretty good dream. I would have hated to interrupt.”

Bucky swats his chest and kisses him through his grin, breaking off every few seconds to punctuate the staccato rhythm with a new profanity. He’s laughing, and so is Steve, and it’s almost unreal, this moment. This honesty that’s been lurking just under the surface, waiting for someone to peel back the curtains.

 

They pass the night like this. Staying up far too late, telling stories and making the confessions that have been held back for nearly a century. For all that they have been secrets for so long, they roll off their tongues like inevitabilities tonight. Like they have been said time after time, the tracks of these sentences worn in and comfortable.

Everything is slowed by kissing; a two-minute story takes an hour, between Bucky’s loving detail and Steve’s distracting lips.

They are ninety-nine and one hundred years old; they are nine and eleven, back to the days of late-night whispering and enthralled tales of love and longing.

 

-

 

In their Brooklyn apartment, four blocks and billions of seconds from their meeting, they line their walls with picture frames.

Bucky buys them when they’re on sale. Dozens at a time, so that he staggers through the door with the tall stacks, clamped between his chin and his hand. Steve laughs every time he does this, but Bucky insists they will need them eventually. They sit in the hall closet, and Steve carefully wipes each one down when Bucky finds something new to display.

First, of course, is the napkin sketch Steve did at Becca and Josie’s wedding. It’s of the happy couple dancing; they are the only things drawn in any kind of detail, but this is done lovingly. Each loop of lace on Becca’s dress drawn by Steve’s careful hand, the lines by Josie’s eyes shaded perfectly--years of happiness perfectly visible in a few quick swipes of a pen. The background is made of rough approximations. Flowers and tablecloths and a whole guest list full of happy faces. This goes in their kitchen, just above the sink.

Over the years, the pictures accumulate.

They find, the day after they finally and mercifully come together, the boxes Becca and Peggy gave to Steve, in 2012, when he woke up. The cardboard is nearly breaking at the seams, and the contents inside are likely worth thousands upon thousands of dollars. They spend the day hunched over each other’s secrets--Steve with Bucky’s notebook, Bucky with Steve’s sketches and his last letter. It’s all things they know, now, but there is something about the age of these things that catches in their throats. They hang one of Bucky’s happier letters in a frame alongside one of the dozens of sketches Steve made of Bucky at the fireside. These go in their bedroom, above the headboard of their bed.

Someone catches a picture of them laughing with Sam and Natasha, all of them with light shoulders and wide mouths. None of them can remember what was so funny; that is, of course, the beauty of it: that scenes like this have happened enough times that they can’t remember which this was. The picture goes on their mantel.

Given to Steve before she died, there is a shot of Peggy Carter and Angie Martinelli, so young, holding hands and grinning in front of the Brooklyn Bridge. They hang it on the wall nearest the couch.

There’s Bucky and Steve both, on the day of Steve’s high school graduation. Bucky towers over Steve, and his grin is as wide as Steve’s frown is deep. Bucky’s arm is slung around Steve’s shoulder, and if it weren’t for the cap and gown, anyone would guess it was Bucky graduating. They hang this picture just inside their doorway, for Bucky to laugh at every time he sets his keys down on the hallway table.

At some point, Bucky goes digging in their boxes to find some of Steve’s old sketches; he finds, of course, the one done on a Brooklyn balcony in the thirties, with a few lines of _Romeo and Juliet_ scribbled at the bottom; neither the quote nor the proportions are perfect, and Steve complains the whole time Bucky centers this one in a frame, but in the end, it goes on one of their bookshelves, next to Bucky’s oldest copy of the play.

A shot of all the Commandos, in a line, half of them mid-word. Steve is grinning, arm around Bucky’s waist. They lean on each other in the center, looking at each other instead of the camera. They hang this one in the hallway, the biggest print they can get without the edges going grainy.

Picture after picture from their trip west, all laid out in a line around their living room like a story--the Grand Canyon, Bucky’s feet on the dashboard, the first glimpse either of them ever caught of the Pacific Ocean, a triumphant shot from the top of the hills of San Francisco, Steve with cheeks full of food in a diner somewhere in northern California, Bucky scooping sand over his feet at a cold Oregon beach, a shot from the bed of that crappy blue pickup, Bucky sitting at the base of a mountainous bookshelf of poetry, Steve grinning at the top of the Space Needle.

And then, scattered throughout the whole apartment are snapshots of this life they have spent nearly a century constructing together.

Asleep and in uniform after a mission, snapped by Natasha before she, too, crashed.

Covered in soap bubbles at the counter in Sam’s kitchen, cleaning up after Christmas dinner.

From behind, running with Fred through a park in the rain.

Bucky kissing Steve at Steve’s first gallery showing.

Steve reading over Bucky’s shoulder at Bucky’s laptop, mid-edit of Bucky’s first book.

And, just above the photo of them at Bella Barnes’s wedding, taken a lifetime ago, there is a photo of them at another wedding. They are in suits, Steve’s deep blue and Bucky’s light grey, with matching ties. Bright flowers are pinned in their lapels, and they are young and radiant in the springtime sun. A few people stand in the background--Natasha and Sam, of course, and Claire and Carol and Jess and Clint and Becca and Josie and just a small handful of others--but the center of the photo is consumed only by Steve and Bucky. They are dancing. Bucky kisses Steve’s cheek as Steve grins and watches their feet. Pale rings, newly placed, catch the sun.

 

-

 

It’s like falling into step with a stranger on the sidewalk—accidental, pure happenstance, but for a moment, it feels like fate.

Sometimes, it is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to anyone who has read through this whole thing, and to anyone who has sent me kind words. It is so, so appreciated.
> 
> As always, find me on tumblr if you want! I'm at [stebers](http://www.stebers.tumblr.com)!
> 
> Thank you again.


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